Chad Thall enters into his first season as a head coach at Centralia this year but is ready.

After nine years as a baseball assistant coach and eight years as a basketball assistant coach at his alma mater, the Centralia graduate was hired before the end of school to replace the departed boys basketball head coach Scott Humphrey, who is the new athletic director at Troy Buchanan. Thall has led the Panthers in more than 10 summer scrimmage games with less than a handful of losses.

Thall brings plenty of winning pedigree from his playing days as a member of the 2003 football state championship team and 2004 boys basketball state title team and as a six-year minor league baseball player for the Baltimore Orioles and Tampa Bay Rays. As a coach, he said he would like to continue the upward trajectory of a program that has increased its win total in each of the past two years, going 17-12 a year ago and making it to its first district championship game since 2019.

“I was pretty excited about it,” Thall said. “I didn’t know if it was time to get out and do something else or take the thing over. I decided to take it over, and they decided that was a good idea.”

That previous district championship game appearance was when Centralia was in Class 3. The Panthers moved up to Class 4 starting in the 2020-21 season and have been there since. 

Thall said it was a struggle the first few years against the new competition but eventually progressed to the point where Centralia was going back-and-forth with state-ranked Mexico through one half. Mexico ran away with the game in the second half to end Centralia’s season, but that served as an example of how the program competes with the big schools nowadays.

“We can’t necessarily play the exact same style as some of the teams we’re going to play,” Thall said. “We have to really focus inward on things we do and try to perfect everything we can do. If you try to go athlete for athlete with bigger schools, it’s not going to go your way a lot of the time. You try to perfect the things you do well and see where the chips fall after that.”

A big area where Centralia has done well is rebounding, Thall said, as the Panthers had several graduated players and several that are returning for next year that crashed the boards. He said that will still be important as the program transitions to his leadership.

“With the personnel we've got coming back and some of the younger guys we’ve got coming in, we’ll be able to play a little faster than we have in the past. We’re still going to try to be as tough as we can defensively and try to get every rebound and loose ball, but the pace of the game is going to turn up a little bit.”

Thall said he has had positive feedback and play from his players this summer about the proposed changes. He said the Panthers have played with some more pace but have understood that securing the rebound is the most important part prior to running the other way.

There will still be plenty of athleticism and skill coming back despite the amount the team lost through the graduated Noah Kropf, Cullen Bennett and Beau Hatton, Thall said. Centralia should be in good shape when it concludes its summer schedule this month.

“We just want to get them to a point where, some of the new stuff we’re going to be running, they’ve got a pretty good idea of it,” Thall said. “That way, once we get into the new season, we hit the ground running and we’re not starting over from zero.”