It’s often the losses that show a basketball coach just what he or she has to work with and, usually, what the team has to work on moving forward.
For Notre Dame High School boys coach Jonathan Adams, Tuesday night’s 51-23 thumping at the hands of McCallie in the semifinal round of the Times Free Press Best of Preps Basketball Tournament at East Hamilton did both.
Fixing the offensive shortcomings revealed vs. the Blue Tornado quickly became a priority and, though not completely solved, enough improvement was seen during Wednesday’s 48-28 win over Howard in the tournament’s third-place game to make Adams smile.
“I was proud of the heart that our kids showed,” Adams said. “McCallie did a great job of kicking our tail yesterday and showing us some things that we needed to work on. To come back out after that and have the performance we had against a really good Howard team showed me our guys have a lot of heart.
“We did a nice job in transition tonight. We had a tough time with that against McCallie but we did a good job of creating turnovers and finishing at the rim tonight.”