Depth a key for Mercer basketball team this season

Bob Hoffman’s Mercer program has had depth before. Specifically, the 2013-14 team that beat Duke for the program’s first NCAA Tournament win had seven seniors and plenty of talent behind them.

But this year’s team has plenty of depth, as well, and the Bears will begin to find out how that is working when the 2016-17 season opens against Brewton-Parker at 8:30 p.m. on Friday at Hawkins Arena.

“Maybe other places, but I don’t know if we’ve been more deep here any other time than this season,” Hoffman said. “We’ve had lots of great teams. The team we had seven seniors that went to the tournament, that was a deep team. We had multiple bigs. So it’s probably close to that team as far as depth, not close to that team as in experience because those guys were together for a long time. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get there, and these guys are going to be together for a little while, too.”

The Bears are led by the junior class of Stephon Jelks, Demetre Rivers, Jordan Strawberry and Desmond Ringer, while also returning are senior center Andrew Fishler and sophomores Ethan Stair, Cory Kilby and Jaylen Stowe.

There are eight new faces on this year’s roster, including five transfers: senior JJ N’Ganga (New Mexico), juniors Ria’n Holland (Indian Hills Community College) and Rashad Lewis (Tallahassee Community College) and sophomores Ryan Johnson (Tallahassee Community College) and Stephen Gavin (Hilton Head Preparatory School).

The freshman class is made up of Darius Roy (Lawton, Oklahoma), Ross Cummings (Dickson, Tennessee) and Mac Brydon (Charlotte, North Carolina).

“Really, I think it comes down to their mindset of what they want to accomplish,” Hoffman said of molding the new faces and returners into a successful team. “If they can see people before them that have done those type things and still have been successful as a team and got to achieve the goals they were looking for, whether that’s to get a degree, hopefully the first thing, secondly, to play on a very good team, to play in postseason, and then finally, the last thing I think would be is if they have any pro aspirations or going overseas.

“They understand that those guys are still getting that done even in the midst of being on a quality team. and I think it stretches you, not only for the present but in the days to come, how to work more with others, no matter what business you go into. You get into the thought process that it is about us, not about me.”

So far, so good, Strawberry said.

“A lot of competitiveness, everybody’s really competitive, everybody’s really talented,” Strawberry said. “And then one thing, I think everybody’s very unselfish. Everybody wants to see everybody succeed.”

This story was originally published November 8, 2016 at 3:36 PM with the headline "Depth a key for Mercer basketball team this season."