On a rainy afternoon, Aaron Stamm and his assistants are giving instructions to the Ludlow Panthers boys basketball team members.
The Panthers scrimmaged Williamstown on Friday at Beechwood and won. After the game, Stamm said that is the best the Panthers have played this offseason.
Stamm took over the program after spending 18 seasons as the head coach of the Ludlow and Conner girls teams. He replaces Dan Sullivan, who stepped down after last season.
As a girls head coach, Stamm accumulated a career record of 343-216.
He led the Ludlow girls to a 25-11 season last year, losing in the opening round of the 9th Region tournament.
The 44-year old is a 1996 Ludlow graduate. Stamm earned letters in basketball, baseball and football during his high school years and led the Panthers basketball team in scoring his senior year while ranking among the state’s best in three-point shooting.
“It was a tough call going from boys to girls. The girls are special,” Stamm said. “But that Ludlow job is the job I’ve always wanted even going through the ranks of coaching girls. I grew up in Ludlow. When it came open again this year, it was just the right time. I’m just blessed to have this opportunity.”
Stamm coached the Ludlow girls the past three seasons. Ludlow has lost in the 9th Region quarterfinals the last four years.
The Panthers finished 69-28 in Stamm’s second stint as head coach. Ludlow was led last year by senior center Jenna Lillard.
Stamm started his coaching career as an assistant on the boys basketball team before taking over the Ludlow girls program in 2004. Stamm led the Ludlow girls to the region tournament three times in six years before going to Conner in 2010.
Stamm led the Lady Cougars to the 9th Region tournament five times in nine seasons including his last four seasons there in the rugged 33rd District. Conner won the district tournament championship in 2017 and lost to Holmes in the region semifinals three straight years in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
The Ludlow boys have not been to the 9th Region Tournament since 2006.
“That’s the goal, getting our kids to believe we can do it down here,” Stamm said. “We have some challenging teams on our schedule to help us get over that hump. That’s what was successful with the girls. We beat some teams some people maybe didn’t think we could beat. We have to do that on the boys side.”
Ludlow is coming off a 14-16 campaign.
“We’ve been very fortunate,” Stamm said. “Our open gyms have been 25, 26 kids. We have a lot of interest right now in the program and that’s a credit to what Coach Sullivan did in getting this program where it needed to be. As long as we keep that, we’re going to get better each day.”
Ludlow has two starting guards returning in senior Jaxson Rice and junior Ethan Powell. Another key returning player is sophomore Spencer Bradenburg. Rice led the Panthers in scoring averaging 13.6 points per game.
Six seniors graduated from this past season.
“I think Coach Stamm had done a good job getting us in the gym and getting us all together,” Rice said. “He’s told us to keep our heads up through adversity and everything that’s happening. I think that throughout the summer he’s going to make us a lot better.”
The Panthers ran an up-tempo style consistently trying to score in transition against Williamstown. They ran a variety of plays in the half-court.
“We’re trying to get them to play for each other,” Stamm said. “We keep instilling that in them in a short span. It’s just taking that one more pass. We have athletes to run. In three to four weeks, we lose a bunch of them to football. At a small school, it’s hard to get the chemistry that we want to have. But we’re doing a good job playing a lot of games and getting better each day.”
Defensively, Stamm said he’d prefer to play a man-to-man style. He noted that has to improve.
“We have a lot of new faces that are trying to understand how we want to coach it,” Stamm said. “We feel like the longer the summer goes, the more we may have to start zoning a bit. Just learning our kids and getting our kids to learn us is the challenge of the summer so far.”
Stamm’s full-time job is running the bookstore at Thomas More University.