By Jeremy McDonald

jermeymcdonald73@gmail.com

OREGON CITY, Ore.–  We’re just days away from tip-off of the Clackamas Community College Men’s Basketball season.

With their game against the Multnomah University JV Team coming Friday, the Cougars are excited to be facing new competition that isn’t themselves.
“We’re ready to play, we’re done play each other in practice,” said Freshman Forward Dwight Dew.  “We want to play other guys, beat up on their guys instead of beating up our guys.”

Like the Holiday Season, the excitement to start the season spread.  Spread enough that Clackamas Head Coach Clif Wegner voiced his excitement of the season.

“We’re just so excited to play a game someone else Friday,” he said.  “I can tell you that I can’t wait for Friday and start this season,” he said with a grin.

The JV team of the Lions are entering Friday’s game with a 5-1 record and are averaging 89 points a game. but Wegner isn’t going to take the lightly and the expectations are high.

“(I’m) not sure what to expect of them,” he said.  “We expect to be better than them, we expect to win and keep improving and keep working on some things.

“We should be able to get all of guys in and get off to a great start.”

Through three scrimmages entering Friday’s regular season opener, Wegner and his staff saw something’s that went well with his team.

They were able to try-out several different line-ups, gave everyone an opportunity to get some playing time to build a bond with one another as well as their defense.

“Our defense is coming along,” Wegner said.  “We’re getting more consistent I think our guys are coming along in terms of learning how to play together.  So we feel like the progress is there.”

But, obviously there are still a few things to improve on that you don’t typically see when you’re scrimmage one another said Wegner.

“We’re really been unhappy of how many turnovers we’re committing,” he started.  “We seem to be overdriving the ball to the wrong spots and we’ve turned it over a lot on starting to break.  Just a basic outlet to get to the point guard, we’ve had a lot of turnovers with that.”

Dew knows that to be successful against Multnomah this Friday and improve on their weaknesses, it starts with practice.

“We’re going to come to practice every day,” he said.  “Practice hard and go after our teammates.  To make our teammates better so when other people go at them hard, their already used to it from everyday at practice.  We’ll have to be ready to play.”

PHOTOS FROM PRACTICE (PICTURES BY JEREMY MCDONALD)

Jeremy McDonald is a professional sports journalist in the Salem/Portland area and is a member of the Society of Professional Journalist in Oregon with B.S. degrees from Southern Oregon University in Journalism (2011) and Health/PE (2013).  Got a story idea? Email him at jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com or on Twitter at @J_McDonald81!

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