New Year’s resolutions are easy to make, difficult to maintain.
    Georgia Southern’s men’s and women’s basketball coaches are re-emphasizing the goals they set for their players at the start of the basketball season.
    GSU men’s head coach Charlton Young wants his players to focus on finishing games. GSU women’s head coach Rusty Cram wants his players to maintain possession of the ball.
    Sounds simple, right? It’s not. It’s much more difficult to follow through with a plan than to simply map it out.
    The GSU men blew a 14-point lead against Auburn on Friday night in Auburn, Ala., and lost, 78-75. Young, whose Eagles (5-8 overall, 3-0 in the Southern Conference) beat Elon, 69-63, on Thursday night at Elon, said he wants his team to finish off opponents when the opportunities arise.
    “We’re trying to build a high-major program,” Young said after GSU’s 86-60 victory over Brewton-Parker, an NAIA program, on Monday night. “Even though we’re in a mid-major conference, we want to build a high-major program. You look at a high-major program like North Carolina. They play Monmouth and they go out and dismantle them, 102-65. That’s what you’re supposed to do
    “When you go up and make a nine-, 12-, 14-point run, instead of letting it drop to nine like we did against Auburn, you’re supposed to push that thing to 19 or 21. Then you win the game. But these young guys are still learning how to win.”
    GSU sophomore Eric Ferguson, a 6-foot-7, 205-pound forward who averages a team-leading 15.1 points per game, said he and his teammates have not gotten over their heartbreaking loss to Auburn.
    “We’ve got a chip on our shoulder because we believe that we should have won the game,” said Ferguson, a Statesboro High School graduate. “We’re just going to carry it over to these SoCon games. Executing will make everything better for us. We can win these games. But it’s still in our blood. It still bothers us.”
    Nothing better than finding motivation to fuel you, to keep you focused on reaching your goal.
    The GSU women’s team is young (only two seniors and three juniors among 14 players). As a result, they have struggled while learning how to play together and learning what it takes to succeed at the NCAA Division I level.
    But the Lady Eagles (5-8 overall, 1-3 SoCon ) have produced a three-game winning streak, including a 56-48 SoCon victory over Wofford on Monday night at Hanner Fieldhouse.
    One of the biggest things hurting the Lady Eagles is turnovers. GSU averages 20.2 turnovers per game, while its opponents average 15.8 turnovers.
    “That’s been our nemesis all year,” Cram said after GSU and Wofford each committed 17 turnovers. “People have been scoring 24, 25 points off us because of our turnovers. We are trying to get ours down below 15 and start getting people to create more turnovers. You saw a lot of that tonight. That’s two or three games in a row where our turnovers have come down, and we’re doing a much, much better job with it.
    “And that’s just experience. These kids are growing up before our eyes. And that’s what we were hoping for, or expected, back in October, that it was probably going to be January before we turned the corner. Right now, they’re starting to feel pretty good about who they are. We’ve still got a long way to go, and we’ve got a lot of work to do, but at least now they’re starting to get that expecting-to-win feeling, and that’s huge.”
    Nothing better than seeing results to keep you focused on reaching your goal.

Noell Barnidge can be reached at (912) 489-9408.