The Wayne Hills boys basketball team suffered an unfortunate loss of 65-48 against cross-town rival Wayne Valley last Thursday night. Any time Hills and Valley play each other, no matter the sport, there’s always a lot of hype to the game. After such a loss, we sat down with Senior Shooting Guard Justin Wills and asked what he thought about the final result of such a tough game.

We first asked Wills if the WHBB team had any different preparation for this game opposed to others, to which he replied, “Me personally, I don’t change for any game, my preparation stays the same. I stick to the routine and do the same thing every game.”  Wills was confident in his work and team, later telling us, “The team has nothing to change moving forward. We are going to be the same team as we have been all year and just try and get better everyday.” Wondering what could’ve went wrong for the boys, we asked Wills, “What do you think went wrong after thinking back? Was it nerves, lack of communication, were they just too hard to beat, or just a bad night?”, Wills explained, “Valley is a good team but at the end of the day you have to make shots to win the game and we just didn’t do that.”

Still shocked to think that nerves didn’t have a big impact on the team’s performance, that it was mainly the fact of just being unlucky and missing shots, we asked Wills if he was more nervous before this game than any other considering the pressure put on such a big rivalry. Wills said “No. I was not nervous for this game. I have played in a lot of big games in front of a lot of people and this was just another game for me.” With some incredible plays made by Valley, we asked Wills, “Which player do you think is the biggest competitor on Valley?” Wills responded, “Valley has five good starters and each of them can hurt us in different ways, so it’s hard to single one of them out.”

Finally, after such a hard lost we wondered if it was going to get harder for our boys, asking Wills if Valley was one of the hardest teams they’ll play this season, which unfortunately, Wills replied, “No, Valley is not our toughest competitor.” After all this, Wills explained that this loss pushed him harder and that he learned to just play better together as a team, that they have to get back to “doing us.”