When it comes to setting the bar, few have placed it higher at such an early age as Moon Area boys basketball coach Gino Palmosina.
The 32-year-old Palmosina already has won three WPIAL boys basketball titles and one state title in his first six years of coaching.
A year ago, in his second season at Moon, Palmosina guided the Class 5A Tigers to a 26-4 record, collecting that third WPIAL championship and reaching the PIAA semifinals before losing. Moon completed Section 4 play with a perfect 10-0 mark, only the second time in school history a boys basketball team has gone unbeaten in section play and the first time since 1946.
Palmosina will see if he and the Tigers can maintain their success, and they won’t have to wait long to get a stern test, as they’ll open the season at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 29, against Imani Christian Academy at Geneva College.
Imani Christian went 19-10 last season and won WPIAL and PIAA titles as a Class 1A school but voluntarily moved up to Class 6A this season.
Palmosina lost a key ingredient from last year’s WPIAL championship team in Elijah Guillory, who graduated, but the Tigers will have three players who saw playing time in Michael Santicola, Carter Tumulty and Braeden Stuart.
Santicola, a Nova Southeastern commit, is a 6-foot-5 senior guard/forward who started as a junior. Tumulty, a 6-6 senior guard, and Stuart, a 6-foot junior guard, came off the bench a year ago.
They’ll be joined by four newcomers in Caden Kopay, Amir Turner, AJ Buford and Caleb Waclawski.
Kopay is a 5-10 junior point guard while Turner is a 6-foot senior guard who transferred from Cornell for his sophomore year and had to watch from the sidelines last season. Buford is a 6-2 junior guard/forward and Waclawski a 6-4 junior forward. Kopay, Buford and Waclawski all played junior varsity ball a year ago.
While pleased with what transpired a year ago, Palmosina hardly seems taken with his own success.
“I’d say we completed some of our goals last season,” he said. “Our end goal is always to win a state championship, which we didn’t reach, but as a whole, we had a great year. We won the section, which is always our first goal, and we won the WPIAL. To see that group of seniors win it was really rewarding. They put a ton of time in during the previous two offseasons to get to that point.”
Palmosina said he isn’t going into this season with a different approach.
“Our mentality is the same and our goals are the same,” he said. “Nothing really changes, to be honest. We haven’t changed anything in the offseason. We have three goals on the table, and those will stay the same no matter who we lost. We feel we have a group that can do it again, and that’s the way we’re going to work.”
Palmosina, who led his alma mater, Bishop Canevin, to two WPIAL championships and one state title in four years as coach, took over a team that was a combined 16-46 in the three years prior to his arrival at Moon.
He figures teams will be gunning for him this year; that wasn’t the case early on last year as the Tigers were coming off a 12-11 season. But he said having a target on the Tigers’ collective back “doesn’t change our mindset at all.”
“I’m sure some teams in our section will want to get a crack at us,” he said. “We understand that and we accept it. We’ll control what we can control. Do your job and good things will tend to happen.”
Section 4 will look a bit different this year, as three newcomers – Blackhawk, Montour and Lincoln Park – will join Moon, West Allegheny, Chartiers Valley and Mars.
“It’s going to be a night in, night out type of thing,” he said of life in Section 4. “The entire section overall will beat each other up. There’s not one bad team – it’s the top tier section in the entire WPIAL. It makes you a little more ready for the playoffs, but it makes you sweat a little bit going into the year.”
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