Christopher Pumphrey, an incoming fifth-grader, said he just wanted to improve his basketball fundamentals while attending the Seymour Owls boys basketball camp at the Lloyd E. Scott Gymnasium at Seymour High School last week.
He said this is the third year he has attended this camp.
“I just work on the fundamentals and try to get better,” Pumphrey said. “I like to drive to the basket.”
He is right-handed and said he worked on dribbling left-handed at the camp.
“I like to shoot from the top of the key. I can see the backboard better,” he said. “I just like basketball.”
He played for the Swish travel basketball team last year, and he hopes the Phoenix Suns win the NBA championship.
“I like Chris Paul’s leadership,” he said.
No sports camps were held at Seymour High School in 2020 because of COVID-19.
“We had 115 kids total,” SHS head boys basketball coach Kirk Manns said of this year’s camp. “It came out about 60% in grades 1-4 and the other 40 grades 5-8. We are up a little bit. We were right around 100 two years ago. We had a good turnout, and we had the middle school coaches and high school coaches working.
“We did station work, and most of our high school players were available out here. It’s just a good time for our younger kids to interact with our coaches and our older kids and just get them in the gym and get them playing, and it seems like everybody is having a good time.”
Manns said all of the eighth-graders worked together, the seventh-graders worked together, etc.
“They’ll play some games, and it will be five against five,” he said.
Braylon Floyd, an incoming sixth-grader, said this was his third year attending the camp.
He said he worked on all parts of his game. He likes to play guard and shoot from the outside.
“I like to shoot from the top of the key because I can see the basket more,” he said. “On defense, I just try to make them speed it up and make them make a bad pass.”
He also likes to play soccer and baseball and also attended camps in those sports.
“I like sports so I can spend time with my friends,” he said.
The younger group played in the auxiliary gym.
“They’ll play some more games over there,” Manns said. “They’re doing a dribble station, a passing station, a shooting station, a lot like the older kids are doing. They’re just trying to introduce those kids to the game of basketball. I said to our coaches and our players that it is important to develop those relationships.
“It’s a great week of basketball. Any time we’ve got all our high school players involved in something, giving back to the community, it’s like when they were small children the players did that so they’re giving back.”
Indiana high school and middle school teams were able to play their schedules last winter, and most of them had to work around issues with the pandemic.
“Indiana may have been the only state in the country that tried to go on with athletics uninterrupted. We all had hiccups with some quarantines and things like that,” Manns said. “Thanks to (IHSAA) staying strong and working with the governor’s office, and the governor really understanding and appreciating how important athletics is to young people, we were one of the fortunate states that got to keep going.”