Vikings get ready for Seeley-Swan, Arlee

The Charlo Vikings boys basketball coach Reese Cox and his team experienced a setback because of inclement weather in the Mission Valley during the break.

Cox and his team didn’t get an opportunity to implement as much strategy and get in as many plays as they prepare to head into the second half of the season in two key conference matchups against Seeley-Swan and the defending Class A state champions Arlee Warriors Jan. 11.

“Right now, because of the holidays, we’ve had a huge dump of snow and we’ve had to cancel practices,” Cox said. “Because of players going on family trips, this portion of the season has kind of been a hard point to really get to the high end of preparing that I would have hoped to have done. That is just the story of the beast of basketball during the holidays. Hopefully, the weather is going to cooperate to get in practice because we’ve had to cancel too many practices because people couldn’t get out of their driveway.”

For various reasons, Cox hasn’t been supplied with a lot of opportunities to analyze his latest opponent: Seeley-Swan.

“With preparing for Seeley, I don’t have too much to scout on them and never got a chance to watch them at our tip-off games (in Frenchtown),” Cox said. “Things just didn’t line up to where I would be able to get much of a look at them so it is hard to judge how good a team is because when they played Arlee, they put up quite a whooping on them. They put the same type of whooping on Plains so it’s very hard to guess where Seeley would be at. We just have to stick with our usual game plan of base defense and base offense. They have too much of a scouting report on any of our players to be worried about.”

Cox wasn’t able to do as much fine-tuning on the schematic portion of his team’s offensive and defensive rotations as he would have liked but he was able to get his team sometimes shooting in the gym.

Cox said he maintains realistic expectations when he is playing against Arlee and realizes his team is going to have to score a significant amount of points against the Warriors if they have any chance to defeat them.

“We are going to have to put up 80 points if we want a chance against Arlee,” Cox proclaimed.

Cox aknowleges achieved the 80-mark will be a “feat.” against the Warriors.