Greenville boys scrimmage National Trail

Green Wave hosts Blazers in preseason basketball scrimmage

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Greenville senior guard Jarrod Demange drive to the hoop for a score in Tuesday night home scrimmage with National Trail. (Gaylen Blosser photo)

GREENVILLE – The Green Wave boys basketball program hosted the National Trail Blazers in a pre-season scrimmage with the varsity, JV and freshman teams taking to the court in front of a fan packed stage from both schools.

“We set some standards for the team,” said Greenville head varsity coach, Matt Hamilton. “One thing we want when we come to play; we want every team to leave saying Greenville is playing hard.”

“I think we did that tonight,” Hamilton stated. “A couple focuses, we want to get more ball pressure and we have to rebound. We had moments where we did that tonight, a few moments we didn’t so we have things to work on.”

Coach Hamilton and his staff continue to use practice and scrimmages to get the team’s starting lineups secured to open the 2022-2023 OHSAA season with the JV still wide open.

“We have 11 guys on the JV and a few of them are looking to see what kind of varsity minutes they can get,” Hamilton said. “Varsity has a pretty good rotation right now. We have a lot of freshmen out so really good numbers for the whole program.”

Greenville competes in the Miami Valley League (MVL) while having the distinction as the league’s smallest boy’s enrollment set by the OHSAA for the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons to determine OHSAA tournament divisions.

Tournament divisions are based on October 31, 2021 school attendance for grades nine, 10 and 11. Greenville had 290 boys enrolled followed by Tippecanoe at 321, Vandalia-Butler 356, West Carrollton 372, Stebbins 428, Sidney 430, Xenia 432, Piqua 435, Fairborn 470 and Troy with 512 boys.

“It is always going to be competitive and we have to be mentally tough night in and night out,” Coach Hamilton said of MVL play. “It’s a physical grind. If we do three things – defense, smart on offense and play together, we’ll compete and do some things.”

MIAMI VALLEY LEAGUE (MVL)

Miami Division

Butler

Greenville

Piqua

Tippecanoe

Troy

Valley Division

Fairborn

Sidney

Stebbins

West Carrollton

Xenia