Boys Basketball is back at Plainfield East, and the Bengals look to establish their high speed offense and hustle on defense this season. 

Head Coach Kanwerdeep Sarkaria and Assistant Coach William Lewis are especially excited about the new faces on this year’s team, differing from the past seniors.

“It’s new opportunities for so many guys. We have a very different team than last year, which leads to new roles, which leads to new beginnings for a lot of these guys,”  Sarkaria said. 

The team this year expects to have a high-scoring offense that will be entertaining to watch and be filled to the brim with athletic three-point shooters.

“Basketball is a game where sometimes the ball goes through the net, and sometimes it doesn’t, but this year I expect the ball to go through the net a lot more times than not,” Sarkaria said.  

While the offense is important, the defense also needs to be solid in order to have success on the court.

“I think we can win conference, we just have to put forth our best effort on defense and offense, and we have to be able to mesh together,” said Jacob Joiner, senior.

A key aspect of defense is rebounding. Allowing opponents multiple opportunities to score on a single possession can make all the difference. With some key rebounders departing, the team focuses on defensive rebounding.

“We’re a smaller team this year. If we can all work on rebounding and be more aggressive towards those boards, I feel like we can see a lot more success,” said Joaquin Madrigal, senior.

Despite the team’s size, they predict that they can compete in the SPC conference among teams like Joliet West and Oswego East.

“We stack up well, yeah, we’re a little undersized, but we’re probably the quickest team. We’re one of the longer teams, so I think we’ll be able to match up well with other teams. Not a lot of people in the conference have bigs, real 6’8-6’9 bigs, only a couple teams,” said Ehi Ogbomo, senior. “We’re lacking in size, but as far as skill goes, we’re not lacking at all.”

The team wants to take advantage of their skill-filled roster this season and have continuity with the energy from last season.

“The good things that we did last year were run really good sets and plays, we were a bit unselfish, we chose to sacrifice a little more, using that mindset going into this year’s big word, sacrifice,” Lewis said.

Students attending games this season can hope to see a high-flying, high-octane Plainfield East team ready to explode both offensively and defensively.