Captain's Blog #1

Mustang's 5th yr Captain Ryan Barbeau

Hello All,

I would like to take this time to formally welcome everyone to another year in Mustangs basketball, a fresh new era of competition and another year to get better and try to make it back to the national stage. As this is my 5^th and final year with the Mustangs my expectations for myself and also for the team are extremely high and I would love to end my tenure here with nothing less than a trip back to Nationals. The team this year is much different then past teams, we have many new faces and over half of the team is comprised of rookies, which definitely makes us one of the youngest teams in the country. Newcomers include: Ryan Higgins, Nick Berardi, Dave Inkumsah, Tony Spiridis, Gregory Morrow, Chuck Drouin, Larry Blyth and Jermaine Bernard. Each rookie will be given the opportunity to contribute to this teams success and as daunting a task as that may be for a first year player, it is something we are going to need. With the losses of veteran players such as Andy Wedemire, Brett Lawerence and Marcus Barnett, we are going to need everyone to contribute in different ways. Whether that is shooting the 3, being a tough rebounder, setting screens or scoring, each guy is going to need to do what they an to help this team be successful. As is usually the case within this program, we have all become very close friends in a very short time. We all enjoy hanging out with one another and as you can probably guess, have experienced some awesome times “hanging” out on the Ceeps dance floor/stage.

We have struggled as of late, losing 7 of our first 9 games, but we have been competitive in nearly all of them, as was seen with our loss to Calgary, a game we debatably should have won, against one of the better teams in the country.  I think that as we become more cohesive as a unit and guys start to understand what exactly their roles are and how they can individually help make this team better, then we will begin to show improvement and become extremely competitive once the season begins. We open up our regular season this weekend at home against York (Friday night @ 8pm) and Laurentian (saturday night @ 8pm) . This should be a great first test for us and hopefully we can be focused defensively and come out with two big W’s.

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Your Captain,

            Ryan Barbeau