After five years at the helm, former Bluefield girls basketball coach Ernie Gilliard retired, giving way to Todd Fong.
Fong, is tasked with rebuilding a program that’s struggled in recent years and lost some of its best pieces, highlighted by Cara Brown, to graduation. He’s embracing the challenge though.
“I don’t know if we replace them exactly,” Fong said of the departures. “I think we’re gonna have to play differently. We just can’t sit there and slug it out with anybody so we’re gonna have to take our shots when they’re there. I think we need to value the ball, but yeah I don’t think you replace those people. One great thing about high school basketball or anything of this nature in college or whatever is the fact that your characteristics and the make up of your team changes each year.”
Despite the departures Fong likes the pieces he has to work with, noting success in other sports.
“We’ve got Laken Harvey and she’s expected to do a lot of good things,” Fong said. “She’s a senior and brings a lot and I think we could probably enjoy some of her presence and some of her ability with the mid-range jumper. I think she’s just a good person too. We don’t have a lot of seniors so we’re relatively young. We have Queen’asia Padgett that we’re hoping that she rejoins a team here and she can add some depth and she’s another senior.
“We have Ava Spangler and she’s our best outside threat but she’s also going to be asked to do a lot more this year because we’re just very thin. That’s the whole thing about our program. We’re thin. We have Iyanna Patton and she’s 10th grader that’s coming off of state champion 4 x 100 team so we hope to utilize her skills and athleticism. We’re going to ask a lot of young folks to step up a little bit and fill some roles.”
Fong is embracing the challenge of a rebuild and with that comes a measured approach. He’s not putting heavy expectations on his young team.
“We don’t have we don’t have too many weapons or too many secrets,” Fong said. “I told my girls we gotta work on it. If we get one percent better every day we’ll be 100 percent better in 100 days. We’re gonna hit some rocky roads early in the season. We just gotta commit to our commitment.”
Fong’s ultimate goal is to restore the program to where it was in the late 2010s when it competed for state championships.
“I’m always a pure optimist so we kind of have a formal plan for the first half of this season,” Fong said. “We wanna get better and I want them to get used to me. I’m the new coach and it’s a little bit different every time you get a new coach. You have to adjust to either terminology, philosophy or game plan. Hard work is part of life and we want to be competitive. We have a tough schedule and I don’t think we have anything easy this year. We’re gonna take our lumps early and hard. Do we continue to show up every day? Do we continue to work and believe in getting better every day? Hopefully in the second half of the season that we can make some noise but my thing is that I have to plant it to see it. I plan to see our goal as you get Charleston.
“We always talk about expectations and stuff like that but if you don’t set a goal you can’t plan to get there. “It’s been several years. I’m very grateful for the opportunity for this challenge and it’s gonna be a challenge and it’s gonna be probably gonna wear all my patience because we all want to know that we want success quickly. But success requires some type of work so I always think we may not always win on the scoreboard, but can we win on the floor. If we’re able to develop who we are as young ladies and they get better and want to get better for each other the team concept. Hard work and work ethic will hopefully prevail.”
