Wayne State men’s basketball will open the season this week with many new faces, which also includes a new head coach.

This summer, Wayne State College hired Jeff Kaminsky, who is the 27th head coach in the 102 years of the Wayne State Basketball Program.

Jeff Kaminsky, who replaced Brian Dolan, will begin his first season at Wayne State College.

“The Division II level has always been appealing to me and it’s something that I look forward to being a part of again,” Kaminsky said.

He is excited to get the ball on the court and also to play in the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference (NSIC).

“The conference, the Northern Sun, had a great appeal to me. I am very familiar with the conference and I have a great deal of respect for the conference and I think it’s a good conference, if not the best in the country,” Kaminsky said.

The men’s basketball team at Wayne has not had the best records over the past few seasons, but Kaminsky says that he is ready to start the rebuilding process and bring some of the tradition back into the program.

“Wayne in particular had some appeal because it’s an opportunity to rebuild a program that has had some outstanding tradition, just not recently,” Kaminsky said.

“This is my fourth head coaching job on a college level that I have had been similar, and I feel that Wayne has the potential to be competitive on a national level,” Kaminsky said.

Kaminsky began his coaching career as a graduate assistant for two years and then moved on to become a head coach.

“My first coaching job was at Kent State University where I was a graduate assistant there, and then I went out and got a head coaching job two years later at a junior college at Mid-State Technical College in Wisconsin,” Kaminsky said.

Along with being excited to get the program pointed in the right direction, he is also excited to start working with the group of young and talented players that are on the roster.

“It’s an interesting roster in that we don’t have a single senior on the roster, so we are a relatively young team, but it is also a team that has a lot of experience,” Kaminsky said.

“A lot of the younger guys played quite a bit when they were younger. It’s an interesting dynamic and a good group of guys to work with and it has been a good fit so far,” Kaminsky said.

Wayne State opened its season yesterday in a home exhibition game against Midland University at Rice Auditorium.

As the time of writing, the game hasn’t taken place.