It’s year two under head coach Derek Witt for the Juanita High School boys basketball team. For the team, year two means the players know what’s going on and what is expected.

“So far so good, I’ve very pleased with what the guys are doing,” said Witt. “I think the biggest thing is that they kind of know what’s expected of them. Where our expectations are and competing. We don’t spend as much time trying to teach that so it’s more time teaching them what they need to know. I think that’s the biggest thing. We were just young. They’ve grown up a little bit and that helps.”

Witt said too that the older players are helping the younger ones learn the system.

“They’ve done a good job of king of seeing what worked and what didn’t last year. The older kids are doing a good job of making sure everybody buys in to what we’re doing,” said the coach.

Two of those players, the captains and only seniors, are leading the charge.

“It’s going well, we’ve improved a lot in the off season,” said captain Ryan Reid. “We’re more of a team now and we’re playing together.”

“We’re working on getting together as a team and working on our chemistry,” said Reid’s co-captain Brett Hamre.

Early on, Witt says he sees the team being competitive on the court, even in practice, which is only going to help this season.

“I would probably just our competitiveness. These kids like to compete,” he said. “They do a lot better job of just day in and day out bringing it. They are finding out that by bringing it everyday they can’t help but get better. They are learning how to play that way.”

Witt hopes they will take that intensity forward.

“I think the biggest thing we can do is to just make sure we bring what they are doing in practice to games,” said Witt. “A lot of it is just confidence and getting more and more confident as we go along. They did a lot of work in the spring and summer and are starting to get there and I think they are going to play some really good competition in KingCo.”

The team has been working a lot on defense, Witt said, applying the team motto ‘we not me’ to the court.

“Defensively we really want to learn how to compete. Our motto this year is we not me, so everybody thinks that automatically offensively but we’re trying to show them that you’ve got to be just as unselfish on defense,” said the coach. “Thinking more bigger picture and that’s making them more and more successful as we go along.”

The team has set weekly goals, Witt said, which they will reevaluate as the season goes on, hoping to hit the .500 mark halfway through.

“I think the big goal is to get better every day, but second of all they’ve set the goal that they want to be a playoff team,” he said. “They set that goal and kind of deciding that we want to be over .500 and then halfway through we’ll reevaluate and see where our goals are and go from there.”

The captains had similar goals for the team, but not necessarily focusing solely on the record.

“For each game we want to be better than the last,” said Reid.

“We want to continue to build the program,” said Hamre.

Becoming that playoff team, Witt said, will take one thing – consistently.

“Consistently. In KingCo there are no nights off. You play every night. The biggest thing is learning to bring it day in and day out instead of having the peaks and valleys. We had some big wins last year and then turn around and the next night just can’t bring that same level of intensity,” said the coach.

The team began the season with a non-conference game against Mariner and will begin league games on Dec. 6 at Lake Washington at 7:30 p.m.

See a full schedule on the KingCo website.