Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Mitch Leger


Just wanted to offer up our congratulations to graduating athlete Mitch Leger on his second consecutive selection to the All-Star Charity Shootout at York University on July 17th, 2010. Mitch is one of ten CIS athletes that will join 20 of the top players in country from the OCAA, CIS, NCAA and the professional ranks. If anyone is in the area on the 17th it would be a great chance to see some high quality basketball and support Mitch, while contributing to a worthwhile charity.


Good luck Mitch!

Thursday, May 13, 2010

First Blog

Hey Everyone!

For those of you that follow Queen's Basketball this serves as the dawn of a new era...we have officially joined the blogging world. Over the coming season I will be using this blog to post frequent updates regarding important news and current events surrounding our basketball program. During the off-season the posts will be a bit more spread out as things are bit slower around here during this time of year, however, once September rolls around I am hoping to use this source a couple of times a week to offer you an inside look into what is going on with the team.

So, thanks to everyone for taking the time to read this and I hope that you will find it worthwhile enough to become a regular user. Here we go...

Despite, what some people may think (more than a few people have asked me "What exactly do you do at this time of year?") the off-season is actually an incredibly busy time of year for us. Following the conclusion of the season we go through our individual meetings with players and begin to finalize our off-season training schedule. We are fortunate again this year in that many of our returning players have decided to remain in Kingston to follow a very busy traininig schedule. This summer we have (between recruits and returning players) roughly 11-12 guys that are here for the majority of May-August. The benefit of this is that we can spend a great deal of time catching up on individual development during this time of year. Unfortunately, the reality is that in season (particularly post-Christmas) it can be very difficult to continually address individual needs when the pressure for game preparation is so demanding. Therefore, the off-season represents an opportunity to really start to address particular weaknesses in each of our players and/or in the group as a whole and to move forward in addressing them. In addition to our on-court work the players also follow an intense strength and conditioning program that is administered by our strength coach, Rodney Wilson. Currently the guys are lifting weights 3x per week with one additional agility/speed session outdoors. Despite only having been at their offseason workouts for 6 weeks, the results are evident and as a group there is no question they are pushing each other a great deal.

Looking ahead we are eagerly anticipating our annual Alumni and Friends Golf Event on Saturday, June 12th, 2010 at Black Bear Ridge in Belleville, ON. If anyone is interested in joining us please do not hesitate to visit http://www.gogaelsgo.com/ for more information. This was a great event last year and we look forward to seeing our support grow again this year.

I think I will leave it at that for today. I will try to update you again sometime early next week. Recruiting is the main focus for us right now and we are only a week or so from finalizing our incoming class. Once all decisions are final I will update you on some of the exciting new additions that we will be welcoming to our program for 2010-2011.

Thanks. Have a great day!

Duncan