Like other sports at the boarding school, Missouri Military Academy is dealing with several new faces and much inexperience.

The Colonels even have a new head coach this season Roger Siwak, who was at Belle last year. It didn’t take him long to notice how different the situation would be for him.

“MMA is unique in that there’s a lot of cadets from a lot of parts of the world,” Siwak said. “We’re learning how to be a team and play together.”

Not only are there kids from countries such as Brazil and Mongolia, it’s also the first year at MMA for some of them, including some seniors. Siwak pointed out there already is some familiarity from their time in school but being on a basketball team is a different form of communication.

The Colonels won’t feature a roster this season with a majority of first-year players, but there is a good number of them, Siwak said. He also said junior Nathan Dempsey is the lone member of last year’s starting five – for a 6-13 team – that will be back this year. Seniors Albert Ogutu and Kellan Mugisha should have bigger roles for varsity after playing mostly junior varsity before.
Senior Lucas Almeida is from Brazil and senior Tsengeg Bayasgalan are a couple of newcoming players that have caught Siwak’s eye.

“Our goal is to get better every night and play our best basketball,” Siwak said. “We’re working on basics like ball handling, getting to the basket, and those kinds of things.”

Siwak said he believes the team has the athleticism to be good in transition eventually and will need to use all the allotted time of practice to improve. He mentioned how busy the cadets’ schedules are with tasks such as marching and evening Mass on top of school so he and his staff have a strict schedule to follow before they release them to the next time commitment.

It is fitting then Siwak has the plan for the season broken down into four keys.

“One is to be coachable and play hard,” Siwak said. “The second is work on winning the red zone – about eight feet from the basket – so we want more red zone touches than we give up. That would be big in transition and big in getting back on defense and pushing the ball. The third thing is the rebound so we simply do not want to get outrebounded. The fourth thing is to take care of the basketball. We’re going to work on ball handling and we’re going to work on our rotation on defense and how to keep guys out of the red zone.”

Obviously, the aforementioned goals sound like what needs to be achieved to have a good basketball team, but none of those are as important as creating a team or brotherhood, Siwak said.

“Above everything else, we want to create teamwork with coachable kids,” Siwak said. “We want kids that really like each other that can play with each other and work together and create a bond.”