ETSU’s men’s basketball team kicked off their season on Nov. 25, with only one indefinite postponement taking place so far — an away game against UNC-Asheville from early December.
Following a reasonably successful December and early January start, the Bucs were initially forced to postpone games against Samford, Virginia Military Institute and Wofford due to a team quarantine, but they have since managed to reschedule the games for later in the season.
The game against Samford was postponed to Feb. 1 and Wofford to Feb. 15, while the VMI game took place Monday at Freedom Hall.
Upon coming out of quarantine, the team had little room for practice to prepare for the games against Furman and VMI, but they were still ready to get back out and play.
“I’m going to try and treat this like going home for Christmas break,” head coach Jason Shay told media outlets WJHL, WCYB and the Johnson City Press in a Zoom conference Jan. 12. “We just came back, and hopefully we can build off of what we did after we came back from break and follow the same plan and see if we can get back to where we were when we got paused.”
In their first game back from the quarantine break, the Bucs fell 78-66 to Furman on Jan. 16 in Greenville, South Carolina. Two days later, the Bucs defeated VMI 92-81 in a school record-breaking night.
With a new record of 16 three-pointers Monday night, the Bucs were on a roll.
“It felt pretty good, especially when we were running the offense that fluently so that everyone can get shots and everyone can feel a part of it,” junior Ledarrius Brewer (Meridian, Mississippi) told media outlets WCYB, WJHL and the Johnson City Press in a Zoom call after the game.
The basketball team is currently preparing for their next game against Western Carolina.
“They’re aggressive,” Shay said of the Catamounts via the Zoom conference. “It’s good that we’ve already played them, so we are familiar with them.”
