Bulldogs look to build off GLIAC Tournament appear­ance last season

The Ferris State men’s bas­ket­ball team returns four starters and looks to improve its .500 record from last season.

Last sea­son, the Bulldogs fin­ished with a 14–14 over­all record and a 12–10 con­fer­ence record, which was good for third in the GLIAC. The team earned its fourth trip to the GLIAC Tournament in the last five years.

The team has four starters return­ing from last year: forward/center Justin Keenan, and guards Darien Gay, Dontae Molden, and Josh Young. The Bulldogs have eight play­ers return­ing from last year’s team. This year, the team’s expe­ri­ence of play­ing with the same core group of play­ers should be an advan­tage. Bill Sall is enter­ing his eighth sea­son as the Bulldogs’ head coach.

“We have a lot more expe­ri­ence than in the past and dur­ing the off-season they worked really hard,” said Sall.

Last year, Keenan and Gay were both All-Star can­di­dates for the Bulldogs. Keenan led the GLIAC in scor­ing with 20.2 points per game a sea­son ago and the Sporting News voted him as a pre-season All-American. Gay was an All-GLIAC sec­ond team pick last year.

Ferris will be look­ing to rely on its return­ing play­ers to improve on last year’s 14–14 record. Throughout the sea­son, Ferris aver­aged more points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks, but were not able to turn those num­bers into more wins.

“We have taken a lot of strides in a lot of dif­fer­ent areas,” said Sall.

On the offen­sive side of the ball, Sall feels very com­fort­able with the team’s inside pres­ence and believes the guards will be able to pro­vide some consistency.

Defensively, Ferris will try to pick up the pace and be more pres­sure ori­ented. Sall wants the team to be an aggres­sive and attack­ing team on both sides of the ball.

Overall, the team believes it can improve upon last year and sopho­more cen­ter Jim Boylan believes the Bulldogs have the tal­ent and mind­set to do so.

“We have a good core of return­ing play­ers and we all want to win the GLIAC,” said Boylan.

Ferris opens the reg­u­lar sea­son on Nov. 15 at Lewis University (Ill.).