The time has finally come for the varsity boys basketball team to dominate.

The team consists of 16 players, half of which are seniors. Of those eight, seven of them are playing in their fourth, and final, year of basketball at RHS. Although these eight seniors have not had the ability to play a full season with one another yet, the comradery and team chemistry has built up over the years.

Experience will be a key factor in the team’s success this year as five of its players (Grant Baer, Brandon Del Rosario, Tommy Edwards, Zack Mancha and Jason Russell) already have two prior years of varsity level play.

The main problem in the past with the varsity team has been that these seniors, who are finally playing together now, have never had the chance to play with each other for a full season.

In the 2013-14 season, some played on the freshman team and six got pulled up to the JV team. In the 2014-15 season, some played JV and the rest got pulled up to varsity as sophomores. In the 2015-16 season, injuries to key players and ineligibility prevented the entire group from taking the court together.

This season, barring injury, the group has a great opportunity to play together and, most importantly, to win.

Additionally, as the Tigers have grown and gotten stronger over the past few years, other teams in the Capital Valley Conference have become slightly weaker. Now, no team is going to be handing out any wins this season, but many are predicted to not be as good as they were in previous years.

The Bella Vista Broncos lost their dynamic sharpshooter, point guard Elijah Gallegos, due to his transfer and also some key big men to graduation and the Del Campo Cougars lost their leading scorer, Joe Gallagher, to graduation.

However, the most apparent example is Antelope, who lost 12 seniors to graduation and, among those, guard Kai Tease who posted 35 and 27 points in his two outings against the Tigers last season. There is certainly a more open CVC league this year that gives the Tigers an opportunity to rise from the bottom of the standings.

So, will this be the year that the Tigers finally show what they’ve been building for the past three years? That is soon to be witnessed on the hardwood come league in January.