ABOUT THE WILDCATS

The Central Coast Wildcats started in 2002.  Our purpose is to provide kids with a competitive basketball environment that stresses fundamentals, teaches the right way to play the game, and helps players develop as young men.  We are a competitive traveling program, but we are still built on enjoying the game.  If basketball becomes a chore…if you really don’t love the game – you won’t be happy, and you probably won’t play to your full potential anyways.  Our goal is to teach young men how to play basketball, how to be competitive and to learn what it takes to win, how to be a good teammate and friend, and how to do all of that while still enjoying the game.  It is a game.  Obviously, when we’re at a tournament or in a league, or even at practice – we’re trying to win and improve.  But, winning is not the ultimate goal - the ultimate goal is to get kids (and parents) to understand the process - and to appreciate hard work, dedication, and sportsmanship - that all leads to winning regardless of the score of a particular game.

We feel strongly that you cannot control the refs, you cannot control how many of your opponents shots go in, you really can’t control how many of your shots fall.  You can do your best to play the right way, put yourself in a position to win, but the bottom line is, sometimes you’ll win and sometimes you’ll lose.  That’s why we focus on learning how to play the game the right way, how to improve your skills, how to prepare to be as competitive as possible, and how to have fun.  If you play well as an individual, if you play together as a team, than you either win or lose…but you can still feel like you accomplished something in the process.

One other main point of our program is to expose our kids to the highest levels of basketball possible.  Instead of focusing on playing in local events, we are trying as much as possible to get the kids out their home towns – see different refs, different coaching styles, different players, different gyms.  Not only will this develop their overall basketball skills and IQ, it will broaden them as people.  All Central Coast Wildcats are great basketball players - but we want to develop great young men that are also great at basketball.  Basketball is a great sport.  Some of our kids will go on to play in college, and maybe even professionally.  But, all of our kids will learn valuable lessons about the value of hard work, teamwork, and being a good person off the court.