Hard work is paying off on match court (From Worcester News)

Hard work is paying off on match court

10:00am Saturday 26th November 2011 in Paul James

WHEN I arrived at Worcester Wolves the club was in disarray and the whole team needed to be rebuilt.

It was quite a tough process for me and I had to find the right balance of student athletes to professional ones.

It has taken time — I knew that it would — but I think now we have got it right and that is showing on the court.

All I wanted this year was to have a competitive squad right from the start and we have got the ratio of professionals to students right.

We went to Sheffield Sharks last night on the back of eight consecutive victories and that is great — the team are performing as one.

Although Tommy Freeman and Sherrad Prezzie-Blue were in the BBL team of the week, both would be the first to say they are there because of how the squad is playing.

Yes, they are scoring points and getting the rebounds, but the guys around them are playing equally as well.

Hopefully, that will continue at Milton Keynes Lions on Tuesday night when we play in front of the Sky Sports cameras for the first live televised game of the season.

But we will not be talking about that until we are back in on Monday morning.

We know Lions will be a tough team on their own court in front of a big crowd so we have to stay focused on the job at hand.

There may be some extra nerves on the court because the game is being shown live on television but it is an opportunity for us to show why we are doing so well.

We have players who are used to being involved in televised matches.

I’m sure overseas players Carlos Fernandez and Arnas Kazlauskas won’t be showing any nerves.

We had another tremendous weekend with the 97-79 win at Mersey Tigers a week yesterday before our 77-76 victory over Plymouth Raiders the following day.

I was extremely pleased with how we played up at Mersey, especially as we had beaten them quite heavily in the BBL Cup the previous week.

It would have been so easy for the guys not to be fully focused on the game, but they were and played even better than the week before.

The game with Plymouth was a bit of a dress rehearsal for the BBL Cup semi-final in a couple of weeks.

Yes, we only won by a single point but a win is a win.

Last year, we complained we could not close out these tight matches.

We are hoping to have a 500 sell-out crowd for the first leg of our semi-final match with Plymouth so, if you want to come along, get in touch with the club — quickly!