New Coach, Who Dis?

Joshua Templeton, the new Conifer High school Boys Basketball Coach hosted tryouts on Monday. Over 40 students tried-out, a great turn out for the program.

Templeton has been around Basketball since he was only 4 years old. He was born in Lima, Ohio and moved to Tennessee when he was in the 3rd grade. Just this year he moved to Colorado and is getting settled by starting as the coach of the basketball program.

“I feel great.” Templeton said, “There’s a lot of energy and buzz. I feel like the guys are really excited about basketball, and I’m really excited about coaching.”

With the high energy in the gym, the players shot with confidence and made shots that Templeton wasn’t expecting to see. 

“They made a lot more shots than I thought they would.” Templeton said, “I wasn’t expecting us to be able to shoot at all. We had some guys make some shots today, and I thought that was fun.”

In tryouts, the team practiced scrimmaging against each other, working with teamwork and communicating well.  

“I think that they’re buying into the culture, like how we wanna be good teammates, and having some toughness with them.” Templeton said.

Templeton has big plans with the team, and wants to build the players to be stronger and better than the past few years.  In the 22-23 season, the team went 6-17. During the 23-24 season, they went 5-18, and both seasons averaged around 30-70 overall points per game. 

“I wanna take the pressure off them a little bit,” Templeton said. “ I feel like they put too much pressure on themselves last year ya’ know? When you string a couple losses together, pressure starts rising and I think the kids built too much. I wanna take that pressure off of them and let them go out and compete to the best of their abilities.”

The hard work that the coaches pushed the players to do paid off and helped build each other’s confidence. Templeton is also confident about the upcoming season just by seeing how the players played and how well they worked together with the different scenarios he tested them with.

“I’m extremely confident.” Templeton said, “I want them to be more resilient, and we saw that with a lot of the football guys on the field this year.” 

There were plenty of football players trying out for the basketball team on Monday and carried what they learned about teamwork from football to basketball.

“Coach Steinfeltt did a great job of building that culture.” Templeton said, “I think that was something that hurt them last year, they started making mistakes and got themselves down over it.”

Templeton shows that he cares about his players, and wants them to be the best players they can be by allowing them to make mistakes and learn from them rather than let themselves get down or discouraged over it.
“I want us to be able to make a mistake and just move on.” Templeton said, “Let’s just move on and try to get better every single day and see what happens.”