Metro East Sun

It's a transition year for the Granite City High School boys' basketball team.

Not only are they implementing a new system from first-year Head Coach Raffi Karibian; they've also dealt with the loss of several players to graduation and several more to transfers.

Karibian believes those changes have contributed to the somewhat slow start for this year's Warriors team.

"We're a very young basketball team," he said. "Although we do play quite a bit of seniors, we only have one returning player from last season that has varsity experience. We lost our top three players to graduation. We had two players transfer at the beginning of the summer. Then we had another player transfer to a neighboring town at the end of the summer. We lost six out of our top seven players from last season. That makes it very difficult. Obviously, (I'm) a new coach coming in with a new system as well."

Despite the challenges, Karibian -- who spent the previous eight years as an assistant at Granite City -- has some very specific strengths on his squad that he is using to his advantage.

"I think that we have some depth: we play a lot of kids," he said. "We share the basketball. We try to get up and down the floor the best that we can, mix up our defenses and use our athleticism to get stops defensively and get out in transition and utilize some of our speed and athletic ability."

Karibian has molded his philosophy for the team based upon the current group of players. He emphasized that it changes each year depending on the talents of his squad. His approach is much different than at the college level, where coaches can implement a system and stick with it. At the high school level, however, a coach's philosophy needs to be much more fluid.

"Everyone you talk to always wants to know your philosophy in basketball -- and I always tell them that if you are Coach (Mike) Krzyzewski at Duke, you can put your foot down and say, 'We're going to play man-to-man and this is what we're going to do,' when you are recruiting kids," he said. "But when you are a high school coach, you pretty much have to do what your team's strengths and weaknesses are. Depending on what kind of size and speed you have, and what kind of talent you have, that lays the foundation of how you are going to play. I'd like to be able to guard and then get the ball out in transition and push the basketball and spread people out, but sometimes you have do different things to be competitive."   

In addition to the transition of both coach and players, Granite City also plays in the notoriously difficult Southwest Conference.

"The competition that we play in the Southwest Conference is second to none," Karibian said. "It's probably the top conference south of Chicago."

The challenge of the Southwest Conference has the Warriors working hard to improve in every practice. The starting lineup features point guard Zidane Moore, shooting guard Freddy Edwards, forwards Jacob Stears and Torrey Deal and center Marquis Shaw; Karibian has them focusing primarily on rebounding and improving their shot selection.

"Right now, a point of emphasis we've been working on a lot is rebounding," he said. "And we have to guard better to get those opportunities for missed shots. And then, offensively, taking care of the basketball is the No. 1 priority. Getting good shots each time. Recognizing when you have a chance to run. I feel like we have a good group of kids who are buying into the system and sharing the basketball, but we just got to figure out how to play inside out a little more."

Ultimately, though, the coach is focused on encouraging improvement and player development. Those are the two most important factors as the team moves through this transitional season, according to Karibian.

"One of the things that I always look for is, have we improved throughout the season?" he said. "That's an obvious thing that we are going to look for. We're going to try to play the youth a little bit when we can to try to prepare for the future as we're building and transitioning. I just want to see us go out and play hard and have some success down the road."