Perennial?champion coach Terry “Elk” Inniss has credited Barbados Community College’s basketball success on not just players’ talent but adherence to a team concept.
“We try to get the best team and not always the best men because we try to show them the value of team work, which we pride ourselves on,” Inniss told MIDWEEK SPORT after the BCC won their ninth schools’ Division One title in ten years on Friday.
“We’ve actually had better players here at BCC who didn’t play for us because they came with their preconceived notions about winning and they didn’t buy into our methods.
“But the players that play for us work really hard, especially the better ones, and they do whatever we ask them to do. So when we get the success that we do we know it’s not a fluke because of the work that was put in,” he added.
The Eyrie Eagles’ latest championship-winning performance against rivals Samuel Jackman Prescod Polytechnic meant that they lost just one game all season.
And this latest season doesn’t even rank as the best, not even among the top three, as BCC have gone at least three different seasons where they failed to drop a single fixture.
“We have been blessed to have some really good players over the years come through here, but they’ve also come into a culture of winning and working hard, so no one ever wants it to be said that the standard dropped with them,” Inniss said.
“And the more we win the more good players want to come and try out for our team because the resumé speaks for itself. But we have benefited from players coming in here as champions from other schools.
“Then this year almost all of our guys played in the Under-21 Tournament, with four playing in the champion team Clapham, and another, Stephan Ottley, playing for the losing finalists, so our boys have been playing meaningful basketball all summer at a relatively high level,” he added.
But the Phil Jackson of schools’ basketball is no stranger to success either, even beyond these last ten years, having won at this level for the past two decades.
That he has had to do with ever-rotating rosters is even more impressive, as Inniss has to coach almost an entirely new squad every two years or so.
“I guess it’s because I understand how to prepare a team in four weeks after doing this for more than 20 years.
“But I have to say that our PE department puts in a lot of work in basketball and the other sports. Then the main thing we do is to preach that defence wins championships,” he said.
“After the first practice I will assess what style it is we need to play, but we never stray from drilling defence, so we spend 60 per cent of our practices instilling man-to-man and the principles of on-ball pressure and weak-side help,” Inniss added.
