Mark Young will romp and stomp the sideline as head basketball coach at Parkers Chapel for the first time since 2017 on Tuesday. The Trojans will open the season at Foreman.
Young previously coached the Lady Trojans but will lead the boys’ team this season. The Trojans were 8-18 last year.
“It’s a little different. I walk past the office I was in for a long time to get to the office that I’m in now,” said Young. “To me, I take it as a great privilege. It’s a task I have. We want to restore the pride in the program and get back to the style and type of basketball that Parkers Chapel has played in the past and been successful at. It’s important to me.”
Young was an assistant coach for the football team, which concluded its season on Thursday. He said he’s been able to conduct some basketball practices.
“We’ve had anywhere from 10 to 12,” he said Saturday during halftime of LSU’s 42-13 loss to Alabama. “We have 18 kids on our roster. We share some kids with golf and tennis and cross country. We just got our football players on Friday. We had a little practice Friday afternoon. We’re planning to get a practice (Sunday) and Monday and then we’ll throw it up there and see what happens.”
Young said the team will return eight seniors, including starters Ethan Mayweather and Eli McNabb.
“It’s going to be a process. We’re going to hopefully be able to execute our man offense, play a little man, play a little zone on defense. Execute some zone offense and have a few base inbounds plays in by Tuesday night,” he said. “As far as being completely ready to do everything, we’re not close to that, yet. We’ve got a lot of seniors. They’re going to give us some experience. I think that will help us get into the groove quicker than if we had a lot of young kids playing. I’m still kind of in a zone of feeling things out of what we’ll be capable of and what’s going to fit us best as a group.”
“We’re going to play, probably eight or nine kids early, maybe 10, just to see where we are. We’ve got enough experience and enough young players to have a good mix.”
The Trojans won’t look the same Tuesday as they will later in the season. At least, that’s the hope. But Young is looking for a good starting point against the Gators.
“You’ve got to knock rust off for sure and we haven’t had an opportunity to do that. You want to start to establish some roles. We’ll play as many as we can,” said Young. “We handled them pretty good last year but they moved up some kids off a pretty good junior high team. I expect them to be much more competitive and being on their homecourt will certainly be an advantage. But it’ll be their first game, too. We just want to go out there and take a look at it, see where our play starts fitting in a little bit and see what we do well and what we need to work on. There’ll be a lot to get out of the film on Wednesday.”