Season Preview: Boys Basketball Ready to Make Some Noise

The Garden City boys' varsity basketball team comes into the 2010-2011 season with a solid core of players and high spirits. They are coached by Larry Steimer, a 13-year veteran with past experience at Freeport, Calhoun and East Meadow. Now, in his fourth year at Garden City as the varsity coach, the boys will look to improve upon their 5-12 finish in Conference 1 last year.

"Hopefully we have a good year. We have a lot of guys on the team who all want to make a contribution," Steimer said enthusiastically.

Steimer brought up a pool of young players from ninth and tenth grade last season who were newcomers to the intensity of varsity basketball – Ed Blatts, Kyle Skramko, Devin Dwyer and Joey Capetola, athletes who now have a season of varsity play under their belts. 

According to Coach Steimer, Dwyer is also a top ranked lacrosse player who will bring those athletic skills to the basketball court. This group will look to help all over the floor and provide good energy to a very close knit team.

The Trojans are also bringing back a lot of talented juniors from last year, who worked hard to improve their game for their final season at Garden City. The combination of youth and veteran leadership should lead to some good success for the Trojans. A year tends to make a big difference, especially when dealing with players that have not played together before. Now that the young players have meshed with the old, it should lead to good chemistry.

"We're returning seven seniors and we have some really good young players that are now a year older," Steimer commented about his team. "We are looking for those seniors to propel us a bit and those ninth and tenth graders to improve upon their performance last year."

Three of those seniors stood out last year as the main force behind this basketball team – point guard James Cauchi, forward Griffin Eilbeck and Frank Cortio.

"Cauchi and Eilbeck probably could have been All-County last year, but due to the ability grouping last year, we only received one award," said Steimer, adding, "They are very vocal in practice and they make sure everyone is doing the right job."

Garden City finds itself in a tough conference but spent the summer training and honing their skills. They worked on free throws and got in the gym a lot to work on their shooting.

"We have a lot of athletes. It's nice to see different kids from different sports that are also basketball players. I'm confident that if we play hard and shoot the ball well, we will be very competitive," Steimer said. "We don't have guys that will score 25 points every game, but we have a lot of guys that do a lot of little things well. We just have to work hard."