WEST ALEXANDRIA — Jeff Case was hired as Twin Valley South’s newest girls’ varsity basketball coach at the Twin Community Local School’s Board of Education meeting on Monday, July 20.
“We know it’s a rebuilding process and we are mostly looking for someone with a vision for their program and someone who will bring basketball knowledge and a desire to get our girls more excited about playing basketball,” said South’s Athletic Director Tony Augspurger.
Case boasts several years of coaching experience – serving 11 years as the varsity assistant and the head junior varsity coach for Troy Christian boys before coaching three years in that same role at Newton. He was also the head boys’ coach at Bradford for two seasons.
In all his roles, he’s never coached a girls’ team. That doesn’t concern him at all, though.
“The rules of the game are the same. Athletes are athletes. You are going to be able to compete against your opponent – boys or girls – it doesn’t make a difference,” said Case. “We have to understand, whether it’s boys or girls, how to compete at your level and what you need to do to get better in order to compete at that level. I’m looking forward to the opportunity.”
Case also understands that he is taking on a program that hasn’t had much success over the past several years, finishing with only three wins just a season ago.
“We’ve got to have a starting point. A baseline to set your goals off of. We want to bring a positive, winning attitude – a competitive attitude – to the Twin Valley South program,” he said. “What we want to do is that we want to get better, work on our fundamentals, and continue to improve and understand how to compete. Once we start competing and putting ourselves in position to win games, then I think the success and the wins will take care of itself.”
Case also said other types of successes are important to him as a high school coach as well. He is hoping his student-athletes grow in character and become better human beings. He added that he is a firm believer in the life lessons that basketball has to offer.
He will look to employ an up-tempo style of basketball as well, where he hopes to bring an exciting brand to the Panthers program.
“We’re going to do everything that we can to play hard and get better as a team,” he said. “You can bet that defensively, we are going to try to speed things up a little bit. What that means is a lot of full-court activity. We are going to guard 94 feet.”
