Trinity Lutheran's Jack Marksberry pulls up for a shot between a pair of Charlestown defenders. Zach Spicer

There will be plenty of learning for the Trinity Lutheran Cougars boys basketball team this winter.

For first-year coach Michael McBride, he doesn’t expect it to ever stop as he hopes to guide the Cougars to their first winning season since 2015-16.

“I don’t think it’ll stop,” McBride said of the lessons he’ll try to instill in his players this season. “This is a team that’s had 21 wins over the last three years.”

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There are just three seniors on this season’s edition of Cougar basketball for McBride to look at for on-the-court leadership.

Kaleb Baumgartel, Josh Rowe and Noah Voelker are his three upperclassmen, but only Rowe found any varsity time last season. He averaged 4.6 points a game in just 11 appearances last year.

The Cougars expect to be paced by a host of underclassmen, especially in their junior class.

Though McBride doesn’t expect to have a go-to option, he does get back three of the Cougars’ top-five leading scorers from a season ago.

Tyler Goecker is chief among them and is the only returning double-digit scorer this season. He averaged 10.9 points per game and played in all but one game last year.

Fellow junior Jack Marksberry (8.6 ppg) and sophomore Mitchell Hackman (8.7 ppg) are the other top-returning point scorers for the Cougars this year.

The trio is also the top-returning rebounders from last year’s squad.

Still, don’t look for any of them to carry the scoring load early.

McBride isn’t sure who will be leading the charge on offense this year and, frankly, he doesn’t care. They don’t have “that guy” that can take over games, but what they will have is plenty of balanced scoring.

That doesn’t mean a go-to offensive option will arise, but McBride isn’t counting on it early on.

“We’ll be a really solid team and have no really big weakness,” McBride said. “We’re capable of having three or four guys lead us in scoring.”

Offense isn’t what McBride is hoping his boys will lean on this year. Instead, he hopes their suffocating defense will lead to easy buckets at the other end.

“I hope we learn how to play defense and that it leads to offense,” he explains.

Trinity Lutheran forced 190 steals last season and they hope to increase that number this year as well as force teams into turning the ball over.

He also hopes they learn to develop a killer instinct and know when to finish off an opponent instead of letting them back into games. He remarked that a few times over the summer, his boys were clock watching instead of finding ways to score.

The Cougars open up the year with some stiff competition.

After their scrimmage against last year’s Class 2A top-ranked Southwestern (Hanover), they’ll host 2A South Decatur and 3A Madison for their first two games of the season.

They’ll play their first Class A game of the year against Hauser on Dec. 3.

Beyond wins and losses, McBride hopes his group learns the team concept.

While he hopes his boys will be able to stack up more Ws than Ls this year, as long as they do it as a team, he’ll be happy.

“I want them to learn the culture of a team,” he said. “Having success as a team and failures as a team.”