LOREAUVILLE – It’s not hard to figure out what happened to Loreauville boys basketball in the 2022-23 season.

The Tigers came out of the gate hot, winning their first seven games of the season before falling back to the pack and struggling the rest of the campaign, finishing with a 12-10 regular season.

“Last year we had a strong start but kind of lost some steam at the end,” LHS coach Darrel Caesar said. “This year, hopefully, we can start getting stronger as the year goes on.”

“We want to be hitting our stride at the end of the season instead of the middle of the season.”

The good news for Loreauville hoops this season is that Caesar returns virtually everyone from last season’s team.

“We had one senior last year so I have everyone coming back,” the LHS coach said. “Last year’s team mainly consisted of juniors and sophomores and everyone is back with an year of experience in the system.”

“We have a couple of players who have been in the system since the 8th grade which means that they have been here for four years already.”

“They have the mental aspect of the game down and with four years of experience already, that’s something that you just can’t have every year.”

Caesar said that this season’s team is going to take pretty much a committee approach to the game in that everyone is going to be counted on to play and produce.

If he gets all five starters averaging 10 points a game that’s great. But he also knows that if someone on the committee gets a hot hand and has two or three games of 20-plus points he will let them keep on that run as well.

The players that the LHS coach will be counting on this year include Kylan Polk, Ricardo Jeanlouis, Pharrell Nora, Dylan Singleton, Hayden Benoit and Tahj Spencer.

“The two seniors, Tahj and Ricardo, I’m definitely going to be counted on the most,” Caesar said. “Their leadership is definitely going to be counted on.”

“In the end, it’s about being a team and winning as a team.”

Offensively, the LHS coach said that he wants to spread people out and create spacing.

“The main thing about basketball is to create spacing so the offense can work,” Caesar said. “Defensively, whatever we need to do to stop the other team is what we are going to do.”

“Whether that is zone or man depends on how the game plays out.”

The long-time Iberia Parish hoops coach is looking for something special out of his team for the 23-24 season.

“I expect us to have a better year than last year,” he said. “This year, with all the experience we have and if we stay healthy, we should have a better year than last year.”

“We should definitely see some growth from last year.”

To that end, the LHS coach beefed up the schedule a little this year so that his team could get some early hard competition to get his team battle tested.

“Last year we started off strong,” Caesar said. “I made the schedule tougher early this year so we could be battle-tested. I wanted to see what our problems were early in the year instead of district time so we can make those corrections we need before we get into district play and have to make changes on the fly.”