Monday Morning Quarterback: Hamilton Men's Basketball

Conference realignment may be common place in division one athletics but at the DIII level it's an anomaly. Not only have the continentals changed conferences they've also changed coaches. Coach Adam Stockwell is new to Hamilton but he is no stranger to college basketball. He has seven years' experience at the helm of two other programs so coming into this season everyone had a learning curve. "Obviously with a lot of new faces having six first year students and a new coaching staff, we really just wanted to get through the early growing pains of learning things and learning terms, learning our concepts, and working at a level of that will be acceptable. That's really what we focused on the first month, now we've started to get into the games and tried to do that even though the competition comes and we've played some pretty good teams." Normally a long season brings injuries to any team, but when a team suffers injuries early, everyone else has to elevate their play. "For sure injuries coming into the season we lost two of our good freshman, which was unfortunate but the first games we played well and came out intense. Our second game, our championship game against Clark we played very well and I think that's a testament to Coach Stockwell getting us ready for the games." Last season Hamilton lost their tip-off tournament, this year was a different story. The continentals beat two quality opponents and coach Stockwell saw his team grow. "I thought we developed a lot of confidence this weekend, certainly a lot of guys that were unsure of where they were as far as their roles really stepped forward and mad soem plays. Had a lot of confidence develop from making positive plays, certainly the wins to more than anything else to just build confidence in each other." Hamilton will have more room to grow with their next five games at home. After that they play two local rivals in Utica College and SUNYIT.