Comets running full-court before start of new campaign

By John Burbridge

sports@charlescitypress.com

CHARLES CITY — On the behavior spectrum, there are bad basketball fans, good basketball fans and saintly basketball fans … you know? … the type who refrains from shouting advice and critiques from the peanut gallery.

First-year Charles City Comet head varsity boys basketball coach Ben Klapperich has settled into the third role as he watches a pair of full-court and highly contested pickup games in the program’s new varsity competition gym within the new middle school.

“We open the gym up and roll out the balls,” Klapperich said. “There has to be someone from the school here while we’re running the open gym. You can’t have students running around inside here with no one looking over them.

“But as a coach, I could only watch. I can’t start coaching until our first practice (on Nov. 14).”

That’s still two weeks off, and Klapperich is chomping at the bit to get started.

“I know in some states they let the basketball players practice while the football playoffs are still going on,” said Klapperich, who previously was the boys head basketball coach at Rockford. “But here they figured it wouldn’t be fair to the teams that had football players still going, so everyone starts at the same time.”

Klapperich and his new team aren’t entirely strangers. He coached several of the Comet key returners in AAU as part of the Iowa Ambush basketball program Klapperich founded.

This past summer, the coach and his prospective players attended several team camps.

Klapperich says that he already likes what he is seeing.

“It’s just a matter of getting the good pieces together,” Klapperich said. “Like a puzzle, we’ve got some good corner pieces, but we need to fill up the spaces in the middle.”

Last season, the Comets relied on an underclass-dominated starting lineup that featured all-Northeast Iowa Conference first-teamer guard Jackson Molstead, who led Charles City in scoring.

“We should have no problem scoring on offense, though I like to increase the tempo from last season and average closer to 65 points a game,” Klapperich said. “I think what it’s going to come down to is how hard we want to play defense.”

Last year the Comets finished at 8-13, but it didn’t take much of an imagination to see that last season could have been closer to .500.

“I know they lost a lot of games in the fourth quarter after leading,” Klapperich said. “This year we need to play 32 minutes of basketball instead of just 28.”

Klapperich also notes that they need to limit opponents to one-shot possessions.

“Looking at the tapes from last season I saw that we gave up far too many offensive rebounds,” Klapperich said.

Shortly after he took the Comet head coaching job, Klapperich warned prospective players that they had better be already in shape by the time the first practice rolled around. The spacious interior of the new gym may help players better cater to that demand.

“We can bring down the auxiliary backboards and have two full-court, full-size games going on at once,” Klapperich said. “You don’t have to sit around and wait to play full-court.”