Last season, a young Panther Valley team had a tough three-game stretch that included Blue Mountain, Lehighton, and Pottsville consecutively.

Panthers' head coach Patrick Crampsie explained that experiences like that specific sequence could help pay dividends for his club in 2015."The biggest thing we noticed is the kids not only come back a year older, but with more confidence," said Crampsie. "A team we talk about is Mahanoy Area. Although they're not in our division, when they play the bigger schools, they're able to compete every year. If we're not the tougher, more emotional, more intense team every night, Division 1 gets tough and we need to bring all of that to give ourselves a shot."Panther Valley's rotation will showcase a nice combination upper and underclassmen, most of which have a ton of experience playing together on the court last season.The vets: Some seniors you will see on the floor include Nate Miller and Sam Stanko."He brings a certain toughness to our team," said Crampsie of Miller. "He's a gritty defensive kid who gets a lot of steals; he's a kid we can count on for some hustle points. He's also number one in his class right now (academically), and if kids don't know where to go they look to him. Sam (Stanko) is a very smart defender who started some games for us last year, he always hustles."A trio of football players will round out Crampsie's PV senior class."Brian Fisher and Kyle Emmert are two football guys that bring toughness and rebounding," he said. "Matt (Hudicka) is a very athletic forward. He's capable of slashing and he's developed an outside shot, we're counting on him defensively to get a bunch of rebounds as well."A pair of junior will also be large contributors to the Panthers. Anthony Micholik is the team's best deep-threat, as Brendan Morgans has developed as a nice post player for PV."More so than last year, we have some different pieces and some guys that can do different things," Crampsie explained. "We definitely want to run the floor, but not at the expense of getting post-touches. We need to allow our playmakers to do their thing."The youth: Two more extremely exciting Panthers happen to be underclassmen. Six-foot-three center Tristian Blasko is returning as PV's leading scorer."We're definitely more athletic than we've been in the past, and we do definitely have some nice experience coming back," the Panther Valley coach explained."My biggest concern is defense. We gave up too many points last year. I was happy with our scrimmages the past week, we're not where we need to be, but it's definitely improved."Freshman point-guard Rene Figueroa will likely round-out the PV rotation - he'll add another exciting element to PV's arsenal.We'll be doing some more dribble-drive than we have in the past, especially with (Rene). We haven't been a team that's done that much the past few years because our personnel had different strengths. Rene is someone that gives us that element."If the Panthers are on the same page, one of their season-long goals is well within reach."Right now, communication and technique needs to improve. Those are things that there's nor reason, can't be improved upon over the next two weeks. We want to get to the end of the season and play some meaningful games. The goal is "11". All we can control is how we play, if we play the way that we are capable of playing, 11 wins is definitely a reasonable goal - but, there's not much room for error on our schedule. It'll be challenging, but we're not going to shy away from that."