The Bellwater State Miners open their basketball season this week carrying the highest preseason conference ranking the program has received in a decade, a vote of confidence third-year coach Byron Haskell says the team has to prove it deserves.
The Miners were picked to finish second in the conference’s preseason media poll, the program’s highest ranking since it last won a conference tournament title more than a decade ago. Haskell, entering his third season, said the ranking reflects the return of a veteran backcourt rather than any single dominant addition. “We didn’t bring in a transfer who’s supposed to save the season,” Haskell said. “We brought back guys who already know what it takes to lose a conference championship game, which is a different kind of motivation than most rosters have in October.”
A backcourt built on two near-misses
Point guard Jalen Osei, a senior who averaged 14.8 points and 6.3 assists last season, said the Miners’ back-to-back conference championship-game losses have become the defining reference point for a roster that returns nearly every meaningful contributor. “We’ve lost that game two years in a row now, and both times it came down to us not executing in the last four minutes,” Osei said. “That’s not talent. That’s poise, and poise is something you can actually fix with another year together.”
Forward Trey Buford, who missed six games last season with an ankle injury before returning for the conference tournament, said the team’s depth up front is deeper than either of the previous two seasons, giving Haskell more flexibility to rest starters during the Miners’ notoriously compressed February stretch of five games in twelve days. “The last two years we were basically playing our starters 36, 37 minutes a night by February and running out of gas in March,” Buford said. “This year coach actually has bodies he trusts coming off the bench.”
A preseason ranking doesn’t win you anything. It just means other coaches in this conference are scared of us on paper, and now we have to go be scared of nobody on the court.
Byron Haskell, Head Coach, Bellwater State Miners
Athletic Director Frank Alcott sees a program on the rise
Athletic Director Frank Alcott, who has pushed for facility upgrades across the department in recent years, said men’s basketball remains the program’s marquee sport and the one most likely to raise the university’s national profile. “When this program does well, it changes the conversation about this university for people who have never set foot on this campus,” Alcott said. “We’ve invested in this roster staying together, and now it’s on the floor to deliver.” Alcott declined to detail specific figures tied to basketball retention efforts, saying only that keeping veteran players enrolled and eligible has become a budget priority alongside the department’s broader facility plans.
The Miners open the season on the road against a nonconference opponent from a neighboring state before their home opener at the on-campus arena later this month. Haskell said he expects to use the nonconference schedule to experiment with lineup combinations, including a small-ball look that pairs Osei with a second ball-handler in crunch-time situations rather than relying solely on Osei to close games, a wrinkle he said the roster’s depth finally allows.
Not everyone is convinced
Not every voice around the program is sold on the preseason hype. A longtime radio analyst who covers the conference questioned the ranking publicly last week, noting the Miners have not actually finished a season ranked as highly as their preseason projection in either of the past two years. Haskell said he welcomes the skepticism. “I’d rather be doubted in October and believed in March than the other way around,” he said. “We’ve been the team picked to finish fourth or fifth for years. Now we’re picked second, and honestly some nights that’s more pressure than being overlooked.”
Buford said the team has talked openly in preseason meetings about the difference between being a good regular-season team and a team built to win a single-elimination conference tournament, a distinction he said cost the Miners both of the past two seasons. “We were good enough in the regular season both years to earn a top seed,” he said. “What we haven’t figured out is how to be the best version of ourselves on one specific Saturday in March. That’s the whole season, as far as I’m concerned.”
Haskell said he has brought in a sports psychologist to work with the team weekly during the season, a first for the program, specifically to address the late-game execution issues that cost the Miners both title-game losses. “We’ve broken down the film from both of those endings more times than I can count, and eventually you realize the issue isn’t a play call, it’s what’s happening in a player’s head when the shot clock is under ten seconds in a tie game,” Haskell said. Osei said the sessions have been uncomfortable at times but useful. “Nobody wants to sit around talking about why we choked,” Osei said. “But avoiding it clearly wasn’t working, so I’ll take uncomfortable if it means we’re actually different in March this time.”
The program has also scheduled its rivalry game against Kincaid’s Division III Ospreys as an exhibition earlier in the preseason, a matchup Haskell said carries little competitive weight given the difference in division but that he uses to evaluate how his bench players respond to a game atmosphere before conference play begins in earnest. Buford said the exhibition has become an unofficial measuring stick for the program regardless of the final score. “Everybody in this city has an opinion about which program is better, even though we’re not really in the same conversation competitively,” Buford said. “It’s still good to go out and set the tone for our season in front of a crowd before anything actually counts.”