Tony Mallamaci last coached in West Virginia in 2019.
The head coach at Bluefield, he oversaw the most successful run in school history when the girls basketball program made three consecutive trips to the state tournament including a title-game berth in 2017.
He’s back in West Virginia as the head coach of the girls basketball program at PikeView, taking over for Tracy Raban who led the program to three state tournaments in four seasons. But Mallamaci isn’t left with a bare cupboard.
The Panthers graduated starters Cat Farmer, Hannah Harden and Brooke Craft but three returning starters including all-stater Riley Meadows.
With that in mind, the expectations are set in stone.
“The expectation as always is to win a state championship but the first you gotta get there and that’s a long hard process,” Mallamaci said. “We have a lot of good players like Riley and Jocelyn Hall, Haley Justice, Tylar Burks and Jaelynn Shrewbury and a player that came in in Karis Trump, who is also a very good player. They blended together real well and I couldn’t ask for a better bunch. They’re working hard and we got a whole way to go and especially on the defensive end. We’ve been struggling a little bit but as far as the work ethic and coachability, it’s been top-notch.”
Mallamaci’s circled a couple areas he wants to see the team improve but before diving deep into playbooks he’s focused on fundamentals.
“We’ve been doing a lot of skill development,” Mallamaci said. “My teams are always kind of slow to come around offensively and defensively because we put a lot of time into skill development and basic fundamentals. We’ve been in it for two weeks now and that’s what we’ve been primarily focusing on. We’re starting to incorporate a little bit more every day and we had to get two scrimmages this week. The first one we were terrible, especially on the defensive end but in the second one we did a whole lot better so we’re just trying to improve on everything and add a little bit every day.”
Those fundamentals will be tested early and often.
PikeView’s schedule features a couple of title contenders and challenging teams including Wyoming East, Greenbrier East, St. Joe, Summers County and Beckley.
“Well, it’s a brutal schedule,” Mallamaci said. “I gotta brush up on all those teams. I know Wyoming East has always been good since I’ve been out. They’re gonna be tough, but as far as like our region and I know Princeton supposed to be real good and of course the Greenbrier East I think it’s supposed to be pretty good. I’m probably leaving somebody out but yeah it’s a brutal schedule. We got like several like back-to-back nights with home and away. I think the first four or five out of six games are on the road I think. But that’s the kind of stuff that I kinda like cause it makes you better. It makes you tougher and it kinda gets you ready as you look towards the postseason.”
Mallamaci sees his team competing for a state championship, but also recognizes they have a lot of room to improve over the next three months. Still, he’s seeing the improvement he wants before the games begin to matter.
“I told them at halftime of our last scrimmage that they’re not playing with enough desperation,” Mallamaci said. “I heard my pastor say something in a sermon a couple weeks ago about you won’t get anything if you’re not desperate for it and I thought we haven’t been desperate enough so we had to talk at halftime. We came out in the second half of the scrimmage and we finally fought. We had a good intensity. We finally looked like we were desperate. We were boxing out, battling for loose balls and we were rebounding so that’s the kind of thing I’ve been trying to work on these first couple weeks. In the second half it clicked pretty good and in practice it seemed to carryover.”
