Milford junior Brad Hall goes up for a contested layup during the Eagles’ 48-33 win over Glen Este on Jan. 16. The win was Milford’s 11th consecutive victory.
Milford junior Brad Hall goes up for a contested layup during the Eagles’ 48-33 win over Glen Este on Jan. 16. The win was Milford’s 11th consecutive victory.

By Chris Chaney
Sun staff

An undefeated start to the season for the Milford High School basketball team has the surrounding community and school district excited about the prospect of a deep postseason tournament run.

However, head coach Joe Cambron and his team have a different perspective on the hot start: act like it never happened.

“A lot of people have been talking to me, our players and our coaches telling us to just keep this thing rolling,” Cambron explained. “I told our guys we don’t want to keep it rolling, we want to start over and get it rolling again.

“We’re treating (our season) like we’re 0-0. We had our first day of practice (on Monday, Jan. 19) in the second phase of our season. We’re starting over at 0-0, so we want to get on a roll and start fresh.”

Inside the Eagles’ locker room, the prevailing message may be that this is a fresh start, but in the halls of the school and around Milford, the team has already accomplished some lofty achievements.

According to athletic director Mark Trout, Milford’s 11-0 start is the best beginning to a season that he has seen during his 20 years at the school. Available records show that the 11 consecutive wins is second-most in school history to this point. The Eagles have won 10 games in a row twice — once in 1965-66 and again in 1980-81. The school record for consecutive victories is 17, set by the 1970-71 Eagles who won 20 games, which also happens to be the most in a single season by a Milford basketball team.

If Cambron’s team wants to continue their march towards history, the coach said that they must tackle the interesting dynamic of starting fresh, while also remembering what got them to 11-0.

“We feel like we’ve done some really good things in the first half of the season and we’re going to build on those,” he said. “But we can’t be the exact same team when we play our conference teams the second time. They’re going to make adjustments because they can’t do the same things they did and think that there’s going to be a different result. They’re going to change, so we have to change.”

What makes the Eagles so difficult to match up with is the sheer number of talented players that they can throw at their opponents on a given night. Lacking the post presence that Milford has become known for in the past, Cambron and his coaches had to reinvent their strategy this season without a traditional, back-to-the-basket big man.

A guard-oriented attack, headed up by senior point guard Ryan Gallimore, has replaced their inside-out offensive tendency and a renewed commitment on the defensive end of the floor has shut opponents down.

“We are a very unselfish group and we really defend,” Cambron said. “If you boil it down to those things, I think that really tells the tale of our season. We’ve had a positive assist-to-turnover ratio in our first 11 games. We’ve been holding opponents to some of their lowest field goal percentages of the year and we’ve not been out-rebounded. That speaks statistically and culturally to our team in the first half of the season.”

No one has embodied that culture more than Gallimore, a three-year varsity starter. Cambron said that the senior point guard has a unique ability to control the floor and flow of a game. His nearly seven points per game don’t jump off of the stat sheet, but Cambron said his impact is felt immensely.

Senior Will Hannah leads the Eagles in scoring, averaging 16.2 per game, but the depth of the roster is truly what makes Milford so hard to contain — nine guys average at least a field goal a night.

“Our field goal percentage and points per game has never been higher,” Cambron said. “Every player that’s on the floor can dribble, everybody can pass and everybody can shoot, so that presents some challenges to other teams when we move the ball like we have been.”

Cambron credited the Eagles’ ball movement and ability to break down defenses as the reason why the team is shooting just under 50 percent from the field.

In the driver’s seat in the Eastern Cincinnati Conference through the first half of the season, the Eagles expect to get the best shot of everyone in the league through the end of January, into February and then the postseason.

“We want to take the positive things we did in the first 11 games and tweak a few things,” Cambron said. “We’re always looking for a way to improve and when we play these teams the second time around, we need to make sure that we’re a different team”

The new-yet-old Eagles began their second phase on Tuesday night at McNicholas and a home game against Anderson kicks off the second half of the ECC schedule on Friday.

11 games into the season, the Eagles are perfect and with 11 to go, they want to duplicate that first-half success.

But don’t tell them that.

They’re starting fresh.