The St Laurence Geelong Supercats are primed and ready to go for the 2008 SEABL season as they attempt to win their fourth consecutive conference championship. This year, former Supercats Team Manager, Trevor Price, will be writing for the Geelong News each week with an inciteful preview of the round ahead.

Read on for Trevor Price's review of the 2008 Supercats squad from this week's edition of the Geelong News.

It will be a new look and feel to the St Laurence Geelong Supercats, when they take to the Arena court to open the new South East Australian Basketball League season this Saturday night against Queensland’s Southern District Spartans.

After a number of seasons with remarkably few changes to the core team personnel, this year saw no fewer than five players, including three of the starting five, leave the team over the off season.

Key among these would be enigmatic import centre Jamal Brown who was not re-signed by the club after four years of service. With Brown’s rebounding ability his main asset to the team, his production of only 285 boards last year, down from a high of 451 in 2004, showed that his best basketball days are probably behind him. The popular centre has been drafted by rival club, the Ballarat Miners.

Another big loss was the late withdrawal from the team of guard Jason Reardon, who has moved to Adelaide for personal reasons and will play this year with North Adelaide in the Central ABA division. Reardon was targeted as a potential future NBL player and Geelong will certainly miss his average 17 points, 7 rebounds and almost 4 assists per game. His loss will force bench players Nick Owusu and Jamie Medved to step their own games up a level to fill this void. In this respect, it is a timely departure with his replacements ready made.

When Dean Brebner was selected as a development player with the Cairns Taipans in the NBL, it was always expected, that he would be asked to remain up north to play with last year’s ABA National champions, the Cairns Marlins, over the winter. It was therefore no surprise to anyone at Geelong when this happened. The loss of the big forward, coupled with releasing Brown, will hurt Geelong in the big man stakes and the Supercats are in the process of finding a replacement big man to add to their line up.

Basketball Geelong has entered a men’s team in the Big V division 1 competition as an intermediate step between the existing Big V Youth League team and the Supercats. The Supercats other two player departures, bench players Keith Harrison and Chris Brown, have elected to play with the Division 1 side this year. Due to complex inter-league rules, this will mean that they will be unable to take the court for the Supercats as well.

On the positive side, the Supercats have been bolstered by the arrival of Daniel George. The centre, who stands at a whopping 208 centimetres tall, has had NBL experience with Brisbane and played the past two seasons in SEABL with Hobart. The 25 year old has moved his family to Geelong and will be a more than capable replacement for Jamal Brown at the starting centre position.

Returning to the Supercats in 2008 will be guard Jordan Hill whose 167 games previously for the club is the second highest all time behind current captain Jarrod Leonard. Hill returns after a 2 year absence due to work commitments and is sure make his physical presence felt when he takes to the court.

There are plenty of members of the Supercats unprecedented three time SEABL championship squad still around including captain Jarrod Leonard, who looks the fittest he has been for a number of seasons, his fellow point guard Braith Cox, guards Jamie Medved and Nick Owusu and bench players Dane Bow and Kris Van Parraren. Import power forward Shawn Myers returns for his third season with the club and, perhaps most importantly, guard / forward Nathan Herbert also returns for the club.

Herbert will fill the club’s second restricted position this year as he was fortunate enough to average more than the limit of 12 minutes per game in his debut NBL season with the Southern Dragons. The board and coaching staff of the Supercats found it only proper to allow the local talent to have the restricted position rather than go with a second imported player this year.

Despite the departures, the Supercats have recruited well to replace them. There are still two more places to be filled on the Supercats squad with an Australian big man, currently playing overseas, and a young guard finishing school in the US strongly tipped to fill these. This will make the St Laurence Geelong Supercats a formidable outfit once again in 2008.

The pre-season has not been very fruitful, with the interruptions caused by Herbert becoming restricted, players being on vacation and delayed arrival of some key position players, Geelong  had less than ten players to most of its training sessions and lost its one and only practice match quite handsomely to ABA National runners up Dandenong. On the eve of the start of the season, the Supercats have finally got their act together and are ready to begin the challenge of a fourth consecutive SEABL conference title. With new players still to be added the team will get stronger as the season goes on and big things are expected by a parochial home crowd.

Brad Bridgewater, who was the selected import who made way for Herbert to rejoin the team, may still get his chance to play in the Supercats singlet this year as visa problems may prevent Shawn Myers arrival in Australia prior to the Supercats opening home fixture against Brisbane’s Southern Districts Spartans this Saturday night. Myers remains in the U.K., where he has played in the British league over our summer, awaiting a sporting visa to be provided. Unlike U.S. imports, Myers, who is from Trinidad, must travel on a sporting visa and cannot arrive in Australia as a tourist and then convert to a sporting visa after he gets here.

Geelong’s opponents on Saturday will also be short handed with no fewer than nine of the listed Spartans squad of 16 being Brisbane Bullets NBL players. Adam Gibson, Tyson Demos, Brad Williamson, Chris Goulding, Tom Garlepp and Peni Nassalo are all likely to be unavailable with the Bullets still contesting the NBL finals against the Melbourne Tigers. Unless the Bullets have a disastrous failure in their NBL semi finals this week, the Spartans may be only to field a makeshift team against the Supercats come Saturday night.

Tickets for the game are available from the Supercats office at the Arena. The opening game tips off at 7:30pm.