GRAY DEYOSports Writer

With games starting next week for the Tullahoma boys’ basketball team, here is a sneak peek of the current look of the team. This goes over the team as a whole, including some thoughts from head basketball coach Jason Welch.

The boys’ basketball team is coming off a season that will live in infamy here in Tullahoma. The Wildcats won a district title, regional title, advanced past sectionals, and made it all the way to the state finals, where they eventually lost to Upperman High School. The team’s appearance in the state final was their first in school history. Going into this year, Tullahoma will have a large group of that state runner-up team returning. Unfortunately, however, they will be without two of the key pieces of last year’s success—Khani Johnson and Xavier Farrell.

“I guess in reality we can’t recreate what we had last year. All we are gonna do is take the players we have, which are really good players, and make the best team we can out of them,” Coach Welch said, addressing how to try to fill the void of losing Johnson and Farrell on his team.

Almost no high school team in the country gets the benefit of all their key guys, being all back the returning season. With this, the Wildcats will have to have some players step up in ways for them to come out of this season with a successful season. Coach Welch talked about some of his players that will be critical in their performance this season.

“The guys that we have returning that played a lot. I mean Lukas Price came off the bench last year, expect him to do a lot more this year. He will come in either start or play a lot more. You know and everybody’s role changes, we need the guys returning, Austin, Alex, Sam, JT (Jayden Thompson), all those guys have to score more this time for us.” Coach Welch went on to name several other players that he expects to play a role for the Wildcats’ team this season, and it is clear that depth is not an issue for this team. He and his staff are still in the midst with the amount of players that can have a positive effect when they step on the court, in figuring out who is going to play and what role they are going to have this year.

Going into this season, the Tullahoma program as a whole has a lot more pop to it when teams see their name on their schedule. And while again it is a new team coming into this season, this rendition of the Wildcats basketball team will have a lot of the same traits instilled in the roots of their team that were their last year.

“I think you want people to think that we are a good team in the fact that we are fundamentally strong, we play the game the right way, and we play super hard. I want them to go away going, man we just couldn’t play as hard as they did and we are making silly mistakes that they don’t make,” said Welch on what he wants opposing teams to think after they play Tullahoma this season.

Tullahoma’s 2025-2026 season officially starts on Nov. 18 when they will travel to Oakland High School for their season opener.