Jared Sale has taken over as the Putnam County boys basketball coach after leading his alma mater’s girls program for the last 10 years.

Sale ended his tenure as the girls coach with the most wins in program history with a 141-143 record.

He takes over a PC boys program that’s struggled over the past two years, going 1-29 last season and 7-25 the year before.

“I’m really happy so far with how hard our guys have been working in practice and they’ve really done a nice job of pushing each other to get better over the course of the first week,” Sale said. “Anytime there’s a coaching change, you expect to see some growing pains, but I think we’ve picked up on a lot of things pretty quickly.”

Sale is happy with the Panthers’ defense during preseason practices.

“I think the guys have picked up on the defensive side of things the quickest and we’ve really been working hard there, so we’re hoping that the defense can keep us in games until we feel more comfortable with the offense.”

Offensively, Braden Bickerman is the team’s top returning scorer at 5.5 points per game, but Sale said “we expect that number to go up quite a bit.”

Johnathon Stunkel and Traxton Mattingly also return with varsity experience, while Juan Ramirez, Brayden Zuniga and Jonathan Avila will make more of an impact this season.

“We’ve got quite a few guys who are seniors who should be able to give us meaningful minutes and step into bigger roles this year,” Sale said. “Juan Ramirez will likely be in the starting rotation and we expect him to take a big step forward this year.”

Juniors Jake Furar and Kade Zimmerlein are newcomers who will plug into the lineup.

“Both are guys who can give us outside scoring threats and play extremely hard on the defensive end of the floor,” Sale said.

Along with Bickerman, Stunkel, Furar and Zimmerlein are expected to be among the team’s top scorers.

“We’d like to be able to get out and go as much as possible, but in the half court the thing I’m most excited about in practice so far is how balanced we’ve been and how well we share the ball,” Sale said.

Sale said it will be a process for the Panthers this season.

“The main focus is to just continue to grow and make improvements,” Sale said. “I don’t expect us to hit the ground running next week and be perfect. There’s going to be growing pains and that’s OK. The expectation is to continue to grow and hopefully start to feel good about where we are around Christmas time and carry that over to the second half of the season.”