By: Mitchell Cutcher, Reporter
OMAHA, Neb.- After a long offseason that brought several new faces to Omaha basketball, the season is less than a month away from starting. Omaha basketball will travel to Lawrence, Kansas on Nov. 7th to start off the 2022-2023 basketball season.
With all the new players that have arrived in Omaha since the end of last season, fans tuning in on Nov. 7th will recognize only a few players from last season’s team. As this will Coach Chris Crutchfield’s first season as a head coach at Omaha, it will be 10 players first year at Omaha. With all of the changes that happened over the offseason, Omaha will be a young team this season.
“We are so young with this year’s Omaha basketball team,” said associate head coach, Kyan Brown. “We have a lot of freshman and sophomores that are going to have to step and play some significant minutes for us.”
While Omaha is a young team overall, they do return their leading scorer from last season, Frankie Fidler. Last season, Fidler played a major role on the Mavericks basketball team, averaging 12.9 points per game, and had big time moments such as home hitting two game-winning shots. Fidler expects to take his experiences from last season, where Omaha traveled to Purdue and Texas Tech, and use them as to what to expect from Omaha’s trip to Kansas.
“It for sure helps, at Purdue I think it was sold out,” said Fidler. It got loud in there so it will help for sure help knowing that it is going to get loud. We got to be extra focused.”
Coach Brown hopes that these experiences on the road will help to prepare the team for the start of conference play in December. After all Omaha is a smaller school and their season is not judged on their wins and loses outside of conference play. For Omaha to make the NCAA tournament at the end of the season they will have to win the Summit League, which is something Fidler thinks this team is a capable of doing.
