Schifino in charge at Waynesburg Central
It’s a new era for Waynesburg Central boys’ basketball, as former WPIAL star Drew Schifino takes over the head coaching duties for the Raiders and will try to turn around the program.
Schifino, 32, is a Penn Hills High School graduate and played college basketball with West Virginia University and California University of Pennsylvania.
After his collegiate career, Schifino played in the Continental League and for some teams in Europe, before coming back to southwestern Pennsylvania.
“I’m very excited for the opportunity here at Waynesburg,” Schifino said. “These are good people here and the kids have been really responsive to me. I just want to bring the winning attitude back and get things back on track.”
The Raiders have had their struggles lately, going 5-17 (0-12 in Section 5-AAA) last year.
Waynesburg has lost its last 36 section games and haven’t had a winning season since the 2004-05 season.
That year is also the last time the Raiders qualified for the playoffs.
According to Schifino, the most important thing for him to do was to build this team’s identity early in preseason practices.
“Every team has to have an identity,” he said. “I want ours to be a hard working, grind-it-out team. We have to be blue-collared and fight for every possession. We can’t back down and we can’t be intimidated by any opponents. We have to fight for 32 minutes.”
Schifino, a versatile guard in his playing days, stresses unselfishness will be critical for Waynesburg on offense this year.
“We have to be unselfish with the ball,” he said. “We have to look for that extra pass on a possession and we have to find the open guy on the court. We have to play as one and for each other. I have always stressed that team always comes first.”
Defensively, Schifino will implement a zone defense and stresses the importance of rebounding.
“We are going to run some zone against some teams and we have to communicate,” Schifino said. “The most important thing for us is to box out and rebound the ball at all times. We can’t be lazy on the glass and that has to be a dependable thing for us on the court.”
The Raiders lost three seniors from last year’s squad, but have a strong nucleus returning in junior guard Dominick Sarra, junior guard John Glenn Davis, junior forward Colby Collins and senior forward Aaron Hill.
“We have 17 kids on the roster and I like the make-up of this team,” Schifino said. “I usually like to run eight or nine (kids) deep in games. We can never be satisfied and we are going to have to push ourselves this season. We have a lot of kids that are solid on both ends of the court and our upperclassmen have to be big for us.”
Waynesburg opens the season on Dec. 6-7 at the McGuffey Tip-off Tournament and starts section play on Dec. 13 at Montour.