Last season, Pat Wanamaker had just three practices with his entire roster before his Northwestern boys’ basketball team’s first game.

He’s not sure how many he will have before this year’s opener. Such is the life of a basketball coach at a school with a football team moving toward a state championship.

“It’s not as tough as you might think. We still have 12 guys every day, which allows us to do a lot of full-court stuff, five-on-five stuff, and then we have a couple of football kids pulling double duty and going to football on some days and coming here when they can,” said Wanamaker, who enters his second season as the team’s head coach. “We have a really good group, and we’ll have more good guys joining us after football, so it’s kind of exciting.”

Seniors Nolan Fitzgerald, Shane Marth and Gavin Nelson are a few of the non-football players on the roster and have been regulars in the gym. They have given Wanamaker some experienced players to draw from to help younger players adapt, and with many of the regulars missing, younger players are getting a better look than they may normally have gotten.

“I like a lot of the guys that we have in the gym. We have a lot of JV guys transitioning to varsity and fighting for some minutes. We had our first scrimmage on Saturday and Brady Krimmel (sophomore), Cannon Fitch (junior), and Malachi Coleman (junior) were three guys that were on JV last season, and ended up starting on Saturday because of the guys who were missing, and they all made the most of it.”

Marth and Nelson were both starters on last year’s team and also played well. Nelson led the team with 16.3 points per game, while the 6-6 Marth has developed into one of the stronger players after a breakout season that saw him average 9.9 points per game for the Tigers.

“I think the confidence factor is something that is more important than the physical factor for Shane,” said Wanamaker. “Shane lives right across the street from my mom, so I’ve seen him spend a lot of time in the street shooting basketball, but it never really translated onto the court for him, and I think a lot of that was a mental hurdle. He was always big, so I think some people force fed him in the paint for a while, and we still do that a little bit, but he’s a guy who is more comfortable outside, and you can see it in the way that he plays.”

Wanamaker is one of the biggest cheerleaders for the football team, and has no worries about his players focusing on football even though the basketball season officially begins Friday night. He battled through it last season, and believes that the team and players will do the same again this winter.

“My personality is just to kind of go with the flow and control what you can. Having those guys chase a football state title is out of our control, and if that’s the biggest preseason problem we have, I think we’re doing OK. We just prepare the best that we can right now, and we’ll be ready to play,” said Wanamaker. “I think a lot of it is that these guys just really keep themselves really fit, and they are able to run up here from the football field and start playing basketball. Because we had to push the schedule around last year, we had a bunch of games backed up, but they all took it in stride. We did have a couple guys kind of hit the wall last year, but we were able to give them a couple days off around the holidays, and they were right back at it.”

The state championship for football is scheduled for the first weekend in December. That leaves the Tigers basketball team to open their season on Dec. 9 at Bangor, and play their first home game Dec. 12 against Southern Lehigh.