Summers County head coach Robert Bowling had a good team led by a standout athlete in Brandan Isaac that competed but fell short of a state tournament berth. But the cupboard isn’t bare, in fact he brings back several experienced and key players.
He’s hoping his returning group can take that next step.
“We’ve got Ryan Oliveros, a  three-years starter for us so he’ll be back,” Bowling said. “He slimmed down a little bit. I think he’s quicker now as a result of that. We played Mount View in a scrimmage on Saturday and I think you end up with 28 points and shot the ball pretty well. We have Robey Brown who was a sophomore last year and started probably I’ll say 17 or 18 ball games. He played a lot this summer. Really has a good all-around game and probably wants to pass more than he does score. But him doing that makes everybody else better. We have sophomore in Damien Fullen has put a lot of work in this this year and I expect he gives us that third guard on the perimeter and should be pretty solid.”
For the last four years Summers has been trapped in a region with Wyoming East and Bluefield, seeing Westside enter the fray the last two years. With another reclassification James Monroe, the 2022 and ’23 Class A state champion, is now in the region, keeping the competition alive.
“We’ve been stuck down here for a long time and as a small rural school that that plays with only our kids, we’re not picking anybody else up obviously, it’s really hard,” Bowling said. “It’s hard in single-A too. I saw Liberty the other day they were kind of down last year. They’re much improved. Bluefield’s always Bluefield and it seems like they have picked up a couple kids. Westside might be the favorite in terms of they got a bunch of kids back. They have really good size as a whole too. I could go on about everybody but there’s just no easy way. You’ve got to not to beat yourself, play hard every night and hope when it counts that some shots go in.”
With a plethora of returners in the backcourt, Bowling already sees a defined strength to lean on.
“I think our guard play is our strength,” Bowling said. “This is probably the best three guards I’ve ever had at once. I’m not saying that individually they’re the best but collectively there’s years we don’t have a point guard and having three kids that can play it is a luxury that not many people have. I’m not sure I’ve ever had it. I might be able to come up with a group from the past, but I think I’d struggle with that.”
Bowling’s ultimate goal is to make it to the state tournament but he has several other goals layered in to help his team measure up and improve.
“I think everybody’s goal is to get to Charleston,” Bowling said. “I mean it might be kind of cliché saying that but you have to have some small term goals as you go through too. I always have a goal to have a winner. I think this team, barring some catastrophic injuries, they are going to win a lot of ball games on our schedule and we hope we can find more wins than losses on it. Again it’s kind of cliché, but you want to get better as the year goes on, but we had a little nerves Saturday because we were playing some kids that haven’t played before and we got some kids that they played before but maybe in a little different role. There’s really no easy games on our schedule this year and so at the end of year you hope you’re playing your best basketball and you know, we’ll see what will happen.”
