Basketball fever hitting next generation

Imlay City varsity boys’ coach Don Gauthier ran his campers through some conditioning drills at Monday’s basketball camp at the high school. Photo by MICHAEL SELECKY IMLAY CITY — With a handful of players from all levels of the boys’ basketball program at his side, Spartans’ varsity head coach Don Gauthier began a four-day excursion Monday into the world of youth development, hosting two different age-based skills clinics at the high school. Because the sessions ran daily from 4:30-6:30 p.m. for kids entering grades 3-5 while athletes in grades 6-8 attended from 7-9 p.m., that allowed the cirriculum to build to several resounding crescendos throughout the week, which in turn hopefully helps ignite a deep-seeded interest in the game, while also planting the seeds of fundamental play.

“Any great (varsity) program has to have a youth program. Our fifth and sixth graders play about 20 games in the winter and we had around 100 kids at our initial clinic for first and second graders. You’ve got to teach the kids the fundamentals at a young age and keep working them while making sure they have fun so they want to keep on playing,” said Gauthier. “Basically, this week we want to teach them the triple threat of fundamentals, like dribbling, passing, shooting, defense, all the basics. With the younger players it’ll be a little more new and then things will become slightly more advanced when we work with the older kids.”

At a cost of $40 for the week, this is the second camp Gauthier and his staff have propagated, with the first one coming this past winter. While that session had slightly better attendance numbers, there were still 15-20 kids at the first clinic on opening day, a number Gauthier thought would hit 50 by the time the evening camp had concluded.

“The first thing we’re going to work on here is just catching the ball and squaring up while facing the basket,” Gauthier said. “We’d like to have greater numbers, but this is the first time we’ve ran a summer skills clinic and it’s been quite some time since anything like this was around here, so we’ve got to start somewhere. Imlay City has a great basketball tradition. They’ve had a lot of good teams in the past, the community seems very supportive and a lot of the kids really seem to enjoy basketball. On the varsity level this summer we’ve played 40 games in places like Flint and Detroit, we hosted a shootout and went to a team camp in Albion and we’ve got alot of committed guys willing to put in the work to help build a winning program.”

With two varsity players and last years team manager in attendance, Gauthier rounded out his six-man staff with three members of the JV and freshman squads, a development made necessary because of his roster’s summer travel schedule. This includes one player who’s in Florida with his AAU team, another was attending an Elite Camp at Spring Arbor University and several others were unavailable because of family vacations.

“I’ll have just as many guys at the evening sessions, but the junior varsity team has some games in Flint so when they leave we’ve got a couple other players lined up,” said Gauthier. “Every young kid looks up to these older guys and wants to play at a high school level. They come and watch them during the season, so it means alot that the high school players are out here working with these younger athletes. We just want to teach and mold this next generation of Spartans and let them know what these guys are all about.”

As for the upcoming varsity basketball season, Gauthier sees his first year on the Imlay City bench as more of a learning experience than anything else, one that serves as a building block for the upcoming campaign despite leaving the Spartans toward the bottom of the Blue Water Area Conference standings.

“We’re going to be much improved. We’ve had a pretty good summer. We’ve competed against teams like Grand Blanc, Flint Beecher and Flint Southwestern and we’ve beaten some of those teams and we’ve come close to beating some of those teams,” Gauthier said. “We’ve got a lot of good leadership and key guys returning. We’re excited, and for these guys, it’s their first experience playing in the summer and they understand that’s what we’ve got to do to get better, and that’s why they’ve been so committed.”