The Georgia Southern Eagles basketball team traveled to Costa Rica to play Costa Rica’s national squad, its U23 team and a nationally selected group of players this past summer.

 The Eagles Head Coach, Mark Byington, took this opportunity as a chance to build his team’s chemistry as they work to fill in the voids of last year’s team leadership.

“I wanted our team to build chemistry and I wanted to see guys step up in a role of leaders. We did lose a lot of guys last year who had that leadership role, but we have guys that can do it on this team,” Coach Byington said. 

He believes the team can be productive and exceed as long as they maintain the responsibilities of playing in sync and getting better everyday from walk-on to graduation.

The Eagles basketball team is comprised of all freshman and sophomores except for the graduate transfer from Marshall, DeVince Boykins, who is eligible to play right away. 

“[Boykins’] really the only guy on our team that has been through multiple years of college and has had plenty of in game experience throughout his years. He’s very versatile, a very good athlete, and has played in numerous big venues and hopefully he steps up and helps us out this year,” Coach Byington said.

Byington expects his team to work hard to become the best team they can be. He believes that as long as they can do that, the long term goals will be taken care of.

The Eagles will have open tryouts on Sept. 2 for any willing Georgia Southern student. Coach Byington feels it’s possible to add one or two more spots to the roster. As he said, he wants players that are good students with high character, and great teammates because the team is the top priority.