PCA coach works to reach, teach hoops even in offseason

Published 8:48 am Tuesday, July 1, 2025

By Jason O. Boyd

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BELHAVEN, N.C. — Basketball season never really ends.

Like many sports on the high school level, hoops doesn’t have an offseason. Sure, this time of year, it’s baseball and softball that dominate. Pretty soon, football, volleyball and soccer will be in the mix as student-athletes return to school and the sports season begins.

But basketball season just keeps on going. That was emphasized during this week’s Pungo Christian Academy boys and girls basketball camps. Middle school and high school boys and girls gathered to learn from Logan Van Staalduinen, the boys’ basketball coach and the school’s athletics director.

“My goal at camp every single year, like what I tell the kids every year is, my job is to teach you things that you can do at home, that you can do on a daily basis, that’s going to help them get better at basketball,” Van Staalduinen said. “So, we do ball handling for 10-15 minutes a day, we do layup fundamentals 5-10 minutes a day, we do some off the dribble stuff, going to the rim, some dribble pull-up stuff, maybe it’s to the mid-range, and then we do some catch-and-shoot stuff as well from mid-range.

“All of it is stuff where you would need an extra body at home, but I try to teach them ways too where we’re throwing the ball to themselves, trying to have that same mental picture of what it would look like, so that way they’re getting game reps.”

The idea is that just because basketball season isn’t going on at the high school level, it doesn’t mean you can’t still learn and grow in the game. Van Staalduinen taught all levels of instruction and offered those who attended an extra edge in growing within the game.

“So it’s kind of jam-packed, so we do 10-15 minutes of defense, 10-15 minutes of passing drills,” Van Staalduinen said. “Then as the week goes on, too, we try to add in different games, like some shooting games, some defensive games, some one-on-one games, so that always gets the kids excited and gets them ready to play, too.

“I think that’s why they come to camp, is to be able to say they beat their friends at knockout, or king of the court, or something like that. But I’m hoping that, you know, getting a lollipop for winning a game isn’t why they’re coming, and what they take away, they take away a lot more knowledge of the game and everything else. So that’s been the goal, and it’s been productive.”

This is Van Staalduinen’s seventh year running the camp. Many of the campers are also on the sports teams at PCA, including basketball. So they get a jump-start on the sports season.

It has been a busy one, especially for Van Staalduinen and the boys’ program. They went to Annapolis, Md., for a camp at the Naval Academy in early June. The program also took a team to Northside High School to participate in its annual jamboree last Friday. The Raiders played in four games against Currituck, Northside and Mattamuskeet.

“I would say about 80% of the guys that have been at camp all week will be at Northside,” Van Staalduinen said. “Because I’ve kind of had a smaller number for camp this year, I haven’t been able to go over simple basketball sets and maneuvers, whereas in years past, where I’ve had two to three times as many kids at a camp, we’ve been able to really go through stuff like a flare screen or a zipper cut or just different things like that that they’re probably not accustomed to.

“And so what they’re going to be able to take into the jamboree is going to be more along the lines of individual skill and just more basketball knowledge. It’s probably going to just help them play better throughout the flow of the game.”

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