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Building the future
~Summer hoops program fosters future for PSJHS~
They are called by their coach the “Future Ballers” and they have their eyes trained on one day donning the purple and gold of the Port St. Joe High School Tiger Sharks.
Port St. Joe High basketball Coach Derek Kurnitsky spent much of the summer guiding a pair of middle school age teams during a recreational league program.
Kurnitsky said he had 23 players combined for his two teams, one an 11-under group, the other 13-under.
The two teams spent a good bit of the summer participating in a recreational league based in Lynn Haven in Bay County, playing a total of 14 games combined.
“We’ve just been playing and working the young kids,” Kurnitsky said. “We’ve been teaching them defense and a little bit about our system so when they get to high school they will have a clue about what we do on the court.
“It was a great summer. The kids played hard and had fun.”
Assisted by Tracy Browning from the middle school and Sandy Quinn, Kurnitsky’s assistant at the high school, the teams stressed two things: learning fundamentally sound basketball and having a blast.
The recreational league games were relaxed affairs, with Kurnitsky substituting freely and the score not nearly as important as the gains made on the hardwood.
Kurnitsky said both teams finished league play over .500, but that was hardly the point.
“Everybody got in, we gave everybody a chance to play and get some minutes,” Kurnitsky said. “There was no pressure. We just had fun.”
This was the first summer Kurnitsky has made this kind of concentrated effort in teaching and coaching the younger players but said the payoffs will come down the road when they arrive in high school as more fully-formed players.
The athletes have always been there, a consistent community pipeline feeding the highly successful basketball program, which reached the state Class 2A Final Four again last season, but Kurnitsky said the opportunity to reach and teach players his system before they finished middle school was invaluable.
“In a small town like here we know what is coming up through the program,” Kurnitsky said. “This was fun, but it was also an important learning step for many of our ‘future ballers.’”
