Winter Sports Preview: Bishop O'Connell

Bishop O’Connell basketball coach Joe Wooten knows that his team is going to be the main target for a lot of teams this season. Over the last two years O’Connell’s success has placed it at the top of the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference (WCAC) and garnered national attention for the program, the coach and the players.

In those two years the team has won consecutive conference championships in what is considered by many to be the toughest conference in the nation, as well as two consecutive Alhambra Catholic Invitational Tournament Championships and two Virginia State Championships.

This year as the team works towards three-peating in conference and tournament play, they are facing the pressure of matching their past performance with a younger team trying to fill some large vacancies left by last season’s seniors. O’Connell graduated three starters and their sixth man last year, all instrumental in leading the team to their 30-4 record.

Wootten is confident, though, that the returning starters will be able to translate last season’s performance to the players stepping into starting roles this year.

Heading the list of returning starters is 6’5” guard Marcus Ginyard. Heavily recruited nationally before signing early with University of North Carolina for the 2005-2006 school year, Ginyard has an impressive all-around game that includes smothering defense, a powerful slashing game and a solid perimeter shot.

But Ginyard is hardly typical of many star scorers. Under Wootten’s tutelage Ginyard has learned to see the performance of the team as the primary goal and, as a result, is more focused on elevating the performance of his teammates than he is about racking up individual numbers. While most of the preseason ink has been spilled over Ginyard, Wootten indicated that the key to the team’s performance could be the less publicized senior Bryant Majors.

Majors, a 6’2” guard is stepping into the starting lineup for the first time this year and brings with him an intense but positive playing style that Wootten is hoping will be infectious. Wootten described him as a great individual defender who is never afraid of taking a charge or going to the floor for a ball. He keeps his head up when things aren’t going the team’s way and is always looking for ways to impact the momentum of the game. “He’s the glue that keeps the team together,” said Wootten.

The other returning starter, David Neal, a 6’7” 240 lb forward brings four years of varsity experience to the team and has the ability to perform in the clutch when needed most.

The future also looks bright for O’Connell with a lot of young talent getting playing time. Most notable are sophomore guards Devon “Ylou” Brown and Gareth Bossard, and freshman guard Jason Clark.

Brown’s quickness and physical gifts, which have made him a starter for the O’Connell football team, make him difficult to guard and an ideal spark for the Knights fast paced game. Bossard, a 6’3” lanky perimeter player, is a dead-eye shot from the outside and has been working hard on his interior play.

While O’Connell’s style of play centers on a stingy defense and a controlled, fast break offense, Wootten said that the essence of what he is trying to coach is much more basic. His coaching is based on a four cornerstone philosophy, made up of belief, trust, honesty and collective responsibility.

During his practices he will come back to those cornerstones in response to specific plays. He used the example of a player passing the ball to a person who had just turned the ball over on the previous play as an example of trust. When Wootten sees something like this in practice he will stop the play and highlight the decision as an example of the team’s overall goals.

Even as Wootten has turned the Bishop O’Connell program around over the past five years, he has never made winning the primary goal. For him, winning is the result of successfully achieving smaller goals. This season, the team goals in games include putting together three consecutive defensive stops, scoring on the break and generally getting better every day. “We’re more concerned with the process than the result,” he said.

Already, at 3-0, Wootten is seeing positive signs for this season. During a game against Hayfield O’Connell was having difficulty overcoming a tenacious opponent but rather than getting demoralized, the team relied on their chemistry to pull out the victory.

“When things weren’t going our way they came together,” Wootten said. He said that this is a sign that despite their youth, they are already playing like an experienced team.

That chemistry is a necessity for teams playing in the WCAC. There isn’t a game that Wootten can point to as being a must win. Day in, day out, the Knights will be pushed to perform at their best this year as they will be playing in seven tournaments with teams ranked in the top 25 in the nation and their own conference is considered one of the most difficult. While Wootten acknowledges the difficulty of the schedule, he knows that his team is looking forward to the challenge. “We’re going to be a big target, but hopefully, that’s why you play,” he said.