Aberdeen Central may be short on overall experience, but it does have big-game experience on its boys’ basketball roster this season.

While graduation took more than its share of players, the Golden Eagles do have members who are accustomed to pressure-packed moments.

Central will count on a pair of juniors, Brendan Phillips and Colby Dauwen, who both played major minutes a year ago. Phillips, who led the team in scoring on multiple occasions, hit a last-second three-pointer to give the Golden Eagles a win over Watertown. Senior Jacob Weishaar also saw extensive varsity action last season.

Central coach Brent Norberg likes what he has seen in practice heading this weekend’s season-opening games against Rapid City Stevens on Friday and Rapid City Central on Saturday at Golden Eagles Arena.

“The kids are working hard. Every practice we get a little bit better. I like the fact that something that didn’t go well the night before, the next morning it did, so that’s always a positive when you’re coaching a team, that they can fix things the next day, and care enough about it,” Norberg said. “They obviously thought about it overnight and came back with a better approach and just did it better.”

The Golden Eagles have numerous multi-sport athletes who have had success in other sports such as football, soccer, and track and field.

Norberg is looking forward to seeing who steps up on the basketball court.

“I always like going into years when you’re going to get contributions from two classes, even three classes of kids. That’s always fun to see the development and growth. I think we have a lot of that,” Norberg said. “It will be interesting to see who really grabs the bull by the horns and gets where they need to be. It always helps for those young kids to have some experienced guys out there and we do, but then the juniors and the sophomores when we throw them out there it seems to help them.”

The Golden Eagles will look to continue to get out in transition and push the pace when possible. Norberg said defense and rebounding are keys to that style of basketball.

“In order to run you gotta defend and you have to rebound. Size helps, length helps. If you look at us on the wings and on the perimeter, we’ve got some guys that can be pretty long and disrupt and deflect passes and get some stuff that way,” Norberg said. “And this year we’ll have a couple of junior guards, they’re short but they’re really strong, physical guys, that I think can put pressure on the ball. If we figure out the best way to use all that, I think we can do some stuff defensively, because everybody wants to run, but you can’t run if you don’t defend, you can’t run if you don’t rebound.”

While the days of Spencer Barr are gone, the former standout who now plays for Jamestown University and his teammates are still impacting the current group of Central players, according to Norberg.

“That group of Spencer’s, we didn’t win a ton of games, but it really kind of set a tone for the next few classes of what it takes to be good teammates, to work hard, to maximize what you have,” Norberg said. “If this group does that, I think we can be hopefully even better than last year’s group, because I thought last year’s group did that. We had a lot of guys last year that maximized their ability for work ethic, being great teammates, our culture was excellent last year.”

While Central had some big wins a year ago, the season came to a frustrating end during the SoDak 16, falling on the road to Sioux Falls Roosevelt.

“I really thought last year we played hard enough, and well enough to win,” Norberg said, “we just didn’t shoot it very well and you just can’t do that when you go to Roosevelt.”

Norberg noted that times have changed since he started coaching when Eastern South Dakota Conference teams played each other twice a season.

“When I first started with AA, the ESD was such a big deal because we played everybody twice. Now that we only play teams once, it always kind of turns into the teams that win it, one they’re good, two they get some of the big games at home, and it’s not the same,” Norberg said. “We always want to win the ESD or try to win the ESD, that’s always a goal, but now it comes where you’re really trying to get wins all year and try to get points and try to get yourself high on that (SoDak 16) list to get the best matchup possible.”