Many new faces as Cougars men’s basketball gets underway

A new season for the University of Regina Cougars men’s basketball team brings a bevy of new players as well.

Head coach Steve Burrows, who’s entering his sixth year at the helm, said this is the largest turnover he’s had with the team — welcoming six new players and three more coming off redshirt seasons.

“We graduated some guys last year, that’s part of what we do, the whole idea of this is you’re going to go to school for five years, we want them to get degrees and then move onto the next chapter of their lives,” Burrows said.

“We’ve got a lot of new guys this year so we’re excited about the turnover, but we’re looking forward to the process of seeing what we’ve got and building into something we’re going to like down the road here.”

Burrows said the goal in September and throughout October is to build chemistry and find out which style of play will best suit them.

“You can’t rush trust and you can’t rush the chemistry that has to develop. As much as you wish you could just press a fast-forward button, there’s no easy way to do that you just have to trust the process and go through it,” Burrows said.

Something that could help with the process is six athletes on the team played basketball together previously at Dr. Martin LeBoldus high school in Regina.

Burrows said he anticipates this too be a fairly quick team on the court with some size to accompany that.

The Cougars, who finished with an 11-9 conference record last season, will begin their Canada-West schedule on Oct. 26 against the Calgary Dinos.