Dec 6, 2017 3 min read

Coming off of its most successful basketball season since 2010, the Belle Vernon boys basketball team is looking for bigger and better things this season.

After only losing rotation players to graduation, the Leopards, who won the Section 3-AAAA title, expectations are higher than they’ve ever been under fifth-year coach Kyle DeGregorio.

“Our expectations don’t change. The goal is to win a WPIAL title,” DeGregorio said. “Although we won the section and made the playoffs a year ago, we fell short of our goal.”

Since he was hired in 2013, DeGregorio has put in work each summer with the players from all ages in the Belle Vernon program, including a middle-school group he worked with in his first year that are now seniors.

That continuous work has led DeGregorio to something every high school program desires to have: depth.

“Right now, we have 17 players that I am comfortable playing at the varsity level,” he said. “We played a full fall schedule with 27 games. Everyone who has played has improved.”

Seven players are back from last year’s rotation and all are seniors.

The group includes guards Griffin LaCarte, Logan Pfrogner, Jake Rathway, Bryce Washington, and Christian Murphy, multi-positional Derek Thomas and 6-5 forward Joe Sabolek.

And while the senior class is a strength of the Leopards, the eight sophomores have made sure to let it known that they aren’t there to just stand around.

Sophomores Larry Callaway, Cam Guess, Jared Hartman, Thomas Hepple, Cam Nusser, Mike Pohlot, Hunter Ruokonen and Danny Troung are all trying to compete for player time.

“These seniors have had success,” DeGregorio said. “But the sophomore class is climbing down their backs.”

Having depth in Belle Vernon’s style of play – an up-tempo attack – allows DeGregorio to substitute rather freely to keep players fresh. He is hoping it also leads to the program’s first WPIAL title in 40 years.

“I think we are better prepared and experienced,” he said. “Our practices are way more competitive and it is putting us in a more advantageous position to win. We need to shoot the ball better and cut down our number of turnovers. And while our defense is pretty good, we need to get better on the back end of our pressure.”

Belle Vernon opens its regular season at the Hempfield Tournament with a game at 5:30 p.m. Friday against Franklin Regional. The Leopards return the next day to play at 2 p.m. against Greensburg Central Catholic, which only lost two games last season.