By JESSE TEMPLE
jtemple@muncie.gannett.com

SELMA — How do you follow up the most successful boys basketball season at your school in more than a decade?

If you’re Wapahani coach Matt Luce, you start by stopping. Stopping the comparisons to last year’s team. Instead, you start focusing on the strengths of this year’s revamped group.

“We had a great year, but that year has moved on and it’s these guys’ time to shine,” Luce said.

The Raiders finished last season 17-4, capturing the Mid-Eastern Conference and producing their best showing since winning 17 games in 1996-97. But they also lost four senior starters from that squad, giving the 2009-2010 version almost an entirely different look.

There is reason to be optimistic, however, because the Raiders’ cupboard is not totally bare. It contains four returning varsity letter winners.

Senior Cory Thomas, who averaged 14 points per game as a wing a year ago, returns as the lone starter off laston’s team.

Wapahani also brings back three key reserves from last year’s 17-win squad. Senior Adam Robinson will play the forward spot after averaging seven points and six rebounds per game as a junior. Brandon Estep, a 6-foot-2 junior, will fill a guard spot. And senior Josh Randolph will handle the point guard responsibilities.

Thomas, Robinson and Randolph help form a six-man senior class for the Raiders. Also expected to contribute are seniors Devin Browning, Cody Mann and 6-foot-5 center Matt Walker, playing his first season of basketball for Wapahani. Junior Aaron McWhirt should see minutes as well at one of the guard spots.

“People have only been thinking we lost four starters last year,” Thomas said. “But what they don’t realize is we have kids that have experience, and we have six seniors on the team and all of us have played together pretty much since we’ve been in second grade.”

Knowing teammates’ tendencies on the court through years of floor time together is perhaps this team’s biggest strength.

So, too, is a demonstrated willingness in practice to scrap and claw for every basket the Raiders can get offensively. Both could go a long way toward making up for last year’s contributions.

That bunch averaged more than 60 points a game for the first time in 10 years, but players on this year’s team anticipate lower scoring affairs.

“We don’t have one dominant person that can shoot the ball lights out,” Robinson said, “but if we play right and we play together, we’re just as good.”

Of course, Robinson was not trying to make specific comparisons. This is a different unit with new ambitions.

Luce, in his third year coaching Wapahani, will be the first to tell you that.

“We’re not going to win 17 games this year.” Luce said. “I can tell you that straight up. But I can tell you that we’re going to have a chance to be in every game because our guys are willing to pay the price, they’re willing to work night in and night out.”

Wapahani’s season begins on Tuesday at home against Blackford.