I was able to speak to Decky Lawson on his input for the approaching and highly anticipated basketball season. Here’s what he had to say:

The 2013-2014 girls’ basketball season is approaching fast! Are you excited to start coaching again?

I’m very excited, I’m most excited for our seniors this year; Cara Waterson, India Terrell, Danaisha Williams, and Mia Valentine. I’m so excited because they came up through the junior falcons system and they’ve been in the program so long. So I’m just waiting to see what happens with them this year and their success.

What are you looking forward to most this season?

I’m looking forward to seeing how our girls are going to respond, since we had a great season last year, and letting them know that last year was big but we have to make our own identity and create our own things for this year to make our team successful with our hard work and dedication.

Who will be coaching with you this year?

We have Jill Gaunts, Ashley Chapple, then Mark Bob Simple.

How do you plan to coach this season with the new group of players you’ll have? Will you do anything differently after losing some high-scoring seniors from last year?

We have to work on a lot of outside shooting. We know a lot of teams are gonna try to pack it in on us. So we got to start to work on outside shooting and creating more for our inside presence we [the other team] tries to play a pack in 2-3 zone, and we have to try to make our defense create our offense. So we’re gonna try to work hard on our defense, and the hard work will always pay off so we can score off of our defense.

When are tryouts this year?

Tryouts are this Monday, the 11th, 8 o’clock, from 8-10 A.M.

Is there anything prospective basketball players should know?

They need to know that our expectations are very high, we have a lot of young players from last year that had the taste of being on the championship team. They’re hungry. And they need the master intensity of the girls that are playing from last year.

What’s your favorite part about coaching the lady falcons?

[Laughs] My favorite part is the relationship. You know, building a relationship with the girls, [I’ve known] 95% of the team since they were younger, and that’s the great thing is the relationship. They know they can come talk to me about anything, and that makes a better team when they know that they can count on their coach and that they can count of their coach for any situation of anything.

Any words to the fans? What should we be expecting to come out of this season?

[The fans] should be expecting a lot. With the fans being our 6th man, our fans are very big at our games. And we’re looking forward to seeing everybody just like we did last year. From the beginning of the season to the end it was great. The community got involved, the teachers got involved, it was so huge to see the falcon spirit back in the school again. I haven’t seen that since I was in here in ’93. So it was great to see that and [I want to] let the fans know that we really appreciate what they’ve done for us.