‘Like a caged animal’

Khalil Murphy has only been in Waynesboro for a couple of months, but thinks he knows what is in store for the River City.

“It’s a quiet town, but I can tell it’s going to be a basketball town very soon,” he said after he was introduced with the rest of the inaugural Fishburne post graduate basketball team on Friday afternoon.

Caissons coach Ed Huckaby formally introduced the team to the Fishburne board of directors, staff, parents and media on Friday before an open intra-squad scrimmage. On Sunday, the team will play at the JC Jamboree at Keer Vance Academy in Henderson, N.C.

“I’d invite the entire community to come out and join us,” Huckaby said. “We don’t look at us as separate from Waynesboro or the entire Valley. We want to represent this entire Valley area. We are looking forward to getting through this season. I’d like to get some guys from this area that need a year of post grad to improve their recruiting and their game.”

After a warm up for the crowd, the Caissons scrimmaged each other for about 20 minutes. The Caissons will get a chance to see how they fare against another team on Sunday at the program’s first scrimmage.

“I’m looking forward to what happens at the scrimmage, not the score, but to see how we execute,” Huckaby said. “If you lose, you are still 0-0, but I’m really looking forward to us doing some things. They have been working tremendously hard, but they are like a caged animal trying to get out. I haven’t let them really go at each other yet.”

Murphy, scaling 6-foot-8, said that while the Caissons feature several high school standouts, there is no single star on the team this season.

“We don’t have a star, we are all stars of our own,” he said.

Marquise Barfield, who is being recruited by Big East and ACC schools, according to the Fishburne media guide, said that the chemistry has been a major focus during the team’s practices.

“The program is going and the team is going good, we are just trying to get everything together so we can gel,” he said. “Everybody is new to this and we just want to make sure we gel.”

In addition to the three-a-day practices that welcomed the team to Waynesboro, the team also had to adjust to Cadet life. Early morning reveille and morning drills were an adjustment for several of the players.

“The first day, I hear horns at seven in the morning,” Murphy said. “I’m looking around like what’s going on and someone kicked on my door and told me to get up. It teaches you a lot of discipline.”

“We just didn’t have time to rest, but it was good for conditioning,” Barfield said.

Huckaby eventually reduced practice time and the Caissons have begun to turn into more of a family than a team.

“We have many different personalities,” Murphy said. “Some days we are excited and some days we are focused. Some days we are out of it and just have to pick it up. We have a lot of different personalities, but we are just building and becoming one big family.

Fishburne will play its first game of the season on Nov. 2 against Mack Academy in Waynesboro.