Taking over a high school basketball program is no easy task, especially when the program you’re taking over had a culture that didn’t suit the players. First-year head coach for the Sale Creek Panthers, Daniel Moore has taken over to rebuild the program on many different levels.
Moore certainly isn’t taking this opportunity lightly, “The job is a blessing, to say the least, very unexpected. I had been spending a couple of years coaching basketball development in the Chattanooga area with some AAU programs.” Now, how did he get the job? “This summer I got a call from the school administration who asked me if I would consider taking the job… After taking some time with my family to discuss it and prayer we decided that this was a good opportunity and one that doesn’t come along very often.”
The Panthers were just 9-19 last season so coach Moore has had his hands full with trying to rebuild this program and to him, there are three main areas of focus that’ll get this program back on a winning track. It starts with changing the culture, he stated during a recent interview on the Baseline 2 Baseline radio show that his kids would miss a shot and immediately look to him on the bench to see if he was going to yell at them for shooting and missing. He realized that these kids need to be encouraged and built up instead of torn down or yelled at in order for them to find success. This team and these players just didn’t have a winning attitude and that needed to change.
The next aspect coach Moore focuses on is teaching his team how to compete. They’re doing that by beefing up the schedule a bit with tough opponents early on this season (which has contributed to their 2-12 record). “Intentionally, we’ve played more games than Sale Creek typically does early on in the season. We’ve intentionally scheduled teams that are better than us. We’ve essentially scheduled larger schools so we can learn how to compete.”
The final step he detailed that this team can’t do unless they accomplish steps one and two is to learn how to win. “Right now we have fixed the culture, it’s a great place to be and play ball, we’ve become competitive if you look at a lot of those games you’ll see that they’re very close games. In several games, we’ve had the lead in the fourth quarter but we just didn’t know how to finish (learning how to win games).
A couple of players to keep an eye on for Sale Creek this season are junior Jackson Moore (2-time MVP as a freshman and sophomore) and Isaiah Harbin, a Senior.
To hear the entire interview with coach Daniel Moore, listen back to the Baseline 2 Baseline show from Thursday here.
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