Chad Walters looking forward to second season with Oley Valley
2024 Berks basketball coverage presented by
Utilities Employees Credit Union
Chad Walters didn’t know he was coaching the Oley Valley boys basketball team until just a few weeks before the season tipped in December. He had no long-range plans when he took the job.
Now, after a positive first season that ended with a spot in the District 3 Tournament, he’s looking forward to a fruitful offseason and returning to coach the Lynx in the 2024-25 season.
“We’ve already ramped up open gyms,” he said earlier in the week. “We’re excited.”
Walters was thrown into the mix when longtime coach Matt Barrell resigned just before the season.
Walters hadn’t been coaching the in program but knew most of the players. He’s an Oley Valley grad, lives in the district, and has a son in the program.
Still, there were immediate challenges. The Lynx lost four of their first five games and were still below .500 with less than two weeks left in the season.
“I asked some of these kids to do things they weren’t used to do,” Walters said. “We did a lot of learning on the fly. The kids were great. This would’ve been a group I would’ve loved to have an offseason with, just to solidify my expectations and some of the roles I wanted the players to be in a little bit earlier than a week before the season started.”
Even with all of that the Lynx were a heartbeat away from winning a division title. They won four straight games down the stretch and were tied with Antietam for first place in Division IV of the Berks Conference in the final week of the regular season.
The Mounts scored the tiebreaking basket with 4.4 seconds remaining to beat them 49-47 and earn the Berks IV title.
“We had our ups and downs, but our season came to two things: we didn’t finish well at times and we turned the ball over in some bad situations,” Walters said. “I thought we played a great game against Antietam, and we fell short. And I thought we played really well in our district game against York Catholic and fell short in that one.”
The Lynx dropped their final game 53-50 at York Catholic.
Walters was one of five first-year coaches in the league this season. One of them, Garrett Etzel, will have a new address next season: He left Wyomissing to return to his alma mater, Gov. Mifflin.
Three Berks boys basketball jobs are currently open: Conrad Weiser, Fleetwood, and Wyomissing. The Weiser job is expected to go to assistant coach Joey Negron, who was approved by the extra curricular committee earlier this week and will go before the full board next week.
Negron will replace Mike Dooley, who coached the Scouts for one season.
Fleetwood needs a replacement for Terry Sitler, who resigned after 12 seasons and three straight Berks III titles.
Oley might not be looking for a coach for a while. Walters, who has coached various sports at Daniel Boone, Fleetwood, and Gov. Mifflin over the years, seems perfectly content there. His oldest son, Ben, played on the Lynx JV team this season and will be a sophomore next season. His daughter Ava was a sophomore on Oley’s Berks IV championship basketball team this season.
“It was fun to come back and coach in the old gym,” said Walters, a standout in baseball, basketball, and soccer at Oley Valley. “It was nice to come back and be back in that locker room again. A lot of memories from back in the day got intertwined with the coaching gig.”
He’s hoping to make more good memories next season when the Lynx will again be battling Antietam for the top spot in Berks IV.
All-Division pick David Turchi, a 6-4 center, is the best of five seniors set to graduate.
Back in the fold is all-division pick Ben DeBalko, the team’s leading scorer at 12.5 points per game and the Berks leader with 63 3-pointers.
His brother Nick, along with several other promising sophomores – among them Evan Fisher, Gryffin Cappellano, and Luke Turchi — return, as does junior Tristan McFarlan, who at 6-3 could be the Lynx’s tallest player.
“Some of those sophomores got some really big game experience and a lot of minutes,” Walters said, “I was real proud of the younger kids.”
