Photo by Justin Roth
After finishing last season with an overall record of 12-14 and 9-9 in the New Jersey Athletic Conference, the Roadrunners will have to improve this season to be a threat in a tough NJAC Conference.
“The two goals that I always set for our team is that we need to be in a constant state of improvement,” said Ramapo’s seventh year head coach Mike Eineker. “We need to get better every day and be better today than we were yesterday and that continue throughout the year.”
Last season, the Roadrunners were knocked out of the NJAC Tournament with a 74-62 loss to the William Paterson University Pioneers in the first round; however, this season the Roadrunners will look to go deeper into the playoffs after being eliminated in the first round the past two seasons.
The Roadrunners were 6-6 at home last season. Even so, they were two games under .500 on road at 5-7. They have played better at home than they did on the road in each of the past four seasons, and they have played .500 ball or worse on the road in three of the past four seasons.
The Roadrunners will be looking to improve their road record this season and will try to pick up valuable wins they missed out on last year.
Six players are returning from last year’s roster for this campaign.
Sophomore forward Kellie Lane placed emphasis on chemistry building: “First we did a lot of outside work before the season came. We go to open gym every day to get to know everyone and play together to get to know how everyone plays. Since then we’ve had practice, we’ve been working on everything, trying to get to know each other and know new people this year,” Lane said. “So we have a lot of new things to learn about each other and how to play together.”
The Roadrunners will be hosting the Roadrunner Tip-off Tournament on Saturday and Sunday, beginning their season with a game against St. Joseph’s Long Island at 3:00 p.m. Saturday.
“We’ve practicing a lot obviously; we had two scrimmages already and I think they’ve shown us quite a bit of what we need to work on, what we need to get better at,” said Eineker. “I think the first thing is we have a group of a lot of new faces, a lot of new ballplayers on our team this year—so the first thing we really have to figure out is how to work hard every day and then we are going to have to figure out how to work together and play a little more together since we have so many new kids.”
