Principal Danny Parkerson can deal with his Bulldogs losing on the basketball court, but the coach, who lead teams to three consecutive state championships in the 1980s, doesn't want his players to lose in the academic arena.
"We've got several kids missing practice, trying to get their reading caught up," Coach Parkerson said prior to the start of the season. A former eighth-grade teacher, Parkerson insists that his ball players put books before basketball.
"Sometimes you have to send statements. Sometimes you have to sit out your best ball player to get him to focus and learn that school is about education. Athletics should be secondary.  School work has to come first.  That's something basketball can assist in."
Without all his players at practice and this early in the year, Parkerson is unsure what to expect this ball season. "It's hard to have expectations until you do a little scrimmaging and know who's going to score," Parkerson said.  However, he does look for the boys to shine. Boys should be pretty decent. We've got a lot of size. We should be pretty competitive with most anybody we play."
Making up the 2013-14 varsity team are eighth-graders Brady Driver, Cody Hale, Ethan Martin, Paxton Butler, Jesse Smith, Damien Dishman, Jacob Frazier, Nick Staley, and seventh-graders, Elijah Foutch and Grayson Redmon.  Cody Antoniak, Braydon Jett, Dallas Cook, Noah Roberts, Clayton Crook, Travis Checci, Dylan Atkinson, Jose Beckham, Garrett Driver, Tyler Bundy, and Cedric Cruz are on the Junior Varsity.
"This is our year," Parkerson said. "Eighth grade makes up the majority of the roster."
"The boys should be an experienced team. It's still going to come back to who's going to stay out of foul trouble, who can step up and score consistently and how good the opposition is. It ought to be an enjoyable year for the boys."
Parkerson returned to coaching a few years ago when P.E. Coach Ricki Hendrix stepped down.  He has help from Dewayne Martin.
Comparing his former players from his early days of coaching to teams in more recent times, he's observed a big change. "What I see is we have a generation of kids that stay in the house and don't get on the goal," Parkerson said. "The shooting ability is not there. We're a video game and cell phone world. That keeps the interest of the kids. That makes our sports deteriorate to a certain extent.
"The boys that came through at that time [1980s], you would see them in the city of Alexandria dribbling a basketball all the time and playing on the outside court all the time and challenging themselves.  Some of those kids didn't have a whole lot of talent, but through hard work, they made talent."