Basketball: Tamworth Thunderbolts to host Springwood Scorchers in Waratah Youth League Round 5 action

After losing their Waratah Youth League Men's Division 2 opener to the Sydney Comets, in their last home outing the Bolts had a commanding win over the Central Coast Waves to get their season going.

They are coming off a good win over the Hawkesbury Jets in the second game of their double header last weekend, and are coach Mitch Balderston said really starting to gel.

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Being an almost completely new side, it was always to take a little bit of time to come together and for them to get an understanding of each other as well as the the standard of the competition.

Balderston is excited to see how they match up with the Scorchers only a few spots ahead of them on the table and having had similar results.

"They've played a couple of opponents we've played and won or lost by similar margins," he said.

After watching some of the 'scouting tapes' from the Scorchers' games, he said they have "made some defensive adjustments".

"We're going to have to do a really good job of rotating and switching on defence," he said.

He also noted that the Scorchers play a zone defence. So far they have only encountered one other side that has run with a zone defence.

"When we played Maitland we were pretty much unprepared for that. We hadn't done much work on that," Balderston said.

"Hopefully we're prepared better."

He said the key to negating the zone is ball movement and playing "team basketball", which is how the Bolts do try to play anyway.

They are missing Archie Cruickshank and Lachie Salvador, but are unchanged other than that.

Tip-off is at 6pm.

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