The Pleasant Home Eagles are eager to begin the 2017-18 basketball season with hopes of making a repeat trip to the South Regional Tournament.

“Our expectations are to improve as the season progresses,” Eagles head coach Troy Turman said. “We’ve broken the season down into thirds, and we want to see significant improvements within each segment of the season. We want to win our area and hopefully make another trip to regionals.”

Turman said that he has a solid group of guys that are motivated to succeed.

“The thing about this group is that they want to go further than some of the teams in the past,” Turman said. “They want to do their best every time they step on the court. There is really no ceiling for this group. They have big time goals and they are willing to do what’s necessary to improve.”

With a lot of his players also playing football, Turman said that they haven’t been able to get in as much practice as he would like before starting the season.

“Going into our first game, we’ve only had four days of practice,” Turman said. “Because of that, I expect that we will be rusty as we are trying to what spots some guys fit into.”

Even with just a few days of practice, Turman said that he has been pleased with what he has seen.

“The attitude has been really good at practice so far,” Turman said. “The first day was not great, but after we talked about my expectations for them we had a drastic improvement on the second day. On Wednesday, we came in at 5:45 a.m., and practiced until 7:30 a.m. The guys were really focused on Wednesday and then Thursday was our best practice yet.”

The Eagles will get the season started tonight when they travel to Geneva for a three-day Thanksgiving tournament.

“I will mainly be looking at who wants to compete and who wants to be coached,” Turman said. “We are going to make mistakes and I’m going to coach them when that happens. I will be looking to see who is competing with the right attitude and who is going to willing to learn from their mistakes.”

Turman said that the time lost some key players from last year, but he believes he has players that are going to step in and fill those shoes.

“We lost some of our size, but we have some guys that are going to be to replace that. We will still have some good size on the team. A big loss was Walt Weaver. He ran the offense and allowed Robert Scott and Tyler Myrick to really play loose. Rico Bovino has said that he wants to be that guy this year for us, and he is going to get that chance.”