HIGH POINT — High Point University’s men’s basketball team, after a successful first season under coach Alan Huss, will now have a target on its back. But that hardly changes the goals and expectations for this season.
The Panthers return a notable chunk from a team that won a conference championship. And they’ve been picked the favorite to win the conference again this season. But the work is just beginning.
High Point will play its second exhibition game of the preseason tonight at home against Averett at 7. It will open its regular season Wednesday night against Coppin State also at 7 in the Qubein Center.
“I think they understand that it comes with a responsibility,” Huss said of his team’s expectations. “If you let down against any opponent, you’re going to get their best shot. And that’s not going to work well for you. I think they’re starting to understand that. Last year we were really up and down in practice.
“We’d have one or two practices a week that weren’t up to our standard. And now I feel like we’ve gone this entire way and maybe had only two or three out of 50 or so practices in the summer and fall that’ve been in that level. So, I think that target has helped inspire us to work.”
The Panthers went 27-9 overall last season — the program’s most wins since 1978-79 (the high mark for Jerry Steele) and its third-most since starting play in 1927-28. The .750 winning percentage was the highest in the program’s Division I history (starting in 1999-2000) and the best since 1995-96.
High Point also went 13-3 in the conference, capturing its fifth Big South regular-season title and first since winning four in a row from 2012-13 to 2015-16. It also won 12 games in a row, which was the longest streak in the country at that point. And it later reached the championship of the CBI postseason tournament.
There were so many successes to celebrate. But perhaps the costliest hiccup was in falling to eventual champion Longwood in the conference tournament semifinals — which denied it a shot at its first Big South tournament title and a trip to the NCAA Tournament.
Out of that disappointment comes another opportunity — especially with a number of the Panthers’ top players returning.
“We felt that this last weekend (in an exhibition at East Tennessee State),” Huss said. “We got up 20 some-odd points and kind of let the other team back in the game a little bit, which was a really big problem for us to see. Maybe a season ago we would have just continued to kind of let it slide.
“And those guys really came together. I think that’s where you see the experience, where they felt the mistakes made a number of times a season ago. Before it ever got to single digits, maybe 12 or 13 points, we pushed it back out and regained our composure.”
High Point returns six of its top seven scorers from last season, its top five rebounders, five of its top six in assists, its top two in blocks, and five of its top six in steals. They include familiar names — Kimani Hamilton, Abdoulaye Thiam, Kezza Giffa, Juslin Bodo Bodo, Trae Benham and Titas Sargiunas.
Giffa, a senior guard who was first-team all-conference last year, was named preseason conference player of the year. Hamilton, a junior forward who was also first-team all-conference, and Bodo, a sophomore forward who was freshman of the year and defensive player of the year last year, were also preseason first-team all-conference.
Add in a dozen newcomers — six freshmen and six transfers (including Terry Anderson from Lamar, Chase Johnston from Florida Gulf Coast and D’Maurian Williams from Texas Tech — all of whom were previously all-conference) — and the Panthers feel like they have a strong foundation.
But High Point, which has been limited by some early-season injuries, is still looking to improve as it competes among the top teams in the league.
“Right now, it’s get healthy and then get better,” Huss said. “We spent a lot of the summer on some new things on both sides of the basketball and seeing if they worked — some did, some didn’t. We’ve got a long ways to go.
“We’ve got to rebound better. A big part of our success last year was we were really the lead rebounding team. We didn’t live up to that standard Sunday. We have to get better in that space. We have to continue getting better defensively. And then we’ve got to get our offense just a little bit more back on track.”
