The Prairie Central under-14 basketball team competing at the 2012 Saskatchewan Summer Games in Meadow Lake July 29 to August 1 may be underdogs, but they are not shy about getting into battle against meaner competition.

The team boasts five ballers from the area on the 10-player roster including shooting guards James Morrison and Mark Rettger, centre Ben Nykiforuk, and point guard Huck Rettger from Davidson as well as forward Austin Evans from Kenaston. Assistant coaches Ian Kadlec, from Bladworth, and Davidson’s Luke Edwards are helping skipper Ken Rettger, a junior basketball coach at Davidson School, to prepare the team for the tournament.

“We have a great group of kids,” said coach Rettger. “You never know going in as we have all kinds of kids from different towns and they don’t know each other, but there is some very nice team chemistry.”

Rettger said the four players from Davidson have been playing together for the past five years, so they have a “pretty good idea” of what each other is up to on the court, plus the player from Kenaston used to play with them on a Basketball Saskatchewan team a few years back. He said their main obstacle is they are an inexperienced team as a whole compared to their opponents.

“We’re young but we’ve got some pretty good ball handlers and some good shooters,” he said. “We have a couple of big kids too, like we’ve got a boy from Osler who plays centre as well and he’s six foot four. We have a little bit of everything, some big guys who play well inside, some very good ball handlers and some shooters. They’re coming together. The last couple practices they really started to play as a team.”

The main competition at the tourney will be the city clubs from Saskatoon and Regina, which seems to be the case at every tournament due to their higher number of players available. Team Saskatoon appears to be a real threat, considering the team is made up of almost exclusively club players from the Saskatoon Slam.

“I’m hoping we can learn to play against them,” said Rettger, adding the team will have a chance to match up with Saskatoon during exhibition play before the tournament at the PAC gym at the University of Saskatchewan in late July. “I don’t know if we could legitimately go in there thinking we could win, but I just want to play well against them and show them what we’ve got.”