ORLANDO — When the Edgard-based fourth grade AAU River City Spartans won the Youth Basketball of America championship this July a cacophony of cheers arose from the players.

It is something head coach Reginald Ross said he had been preparing his players for in the weeks prior to the tournament.

“I am a strong believer in visualization and preparing yourself mentally for the reward you are going to get ahead of time,” Ross said.

After the team qualified for the national championship tournament they ended each practice with a simple exercise. The team would run laps in the gym with one player poised at the free throw line.

“If the person missed the free throw they would have keep on running another couple of laps,” Ross said. “We would get somebody else to shoot the free throw and we would literally do it until someone made it. But when that person made that last free throw I wanted them all to jump up and go crazy and celebrate just like they would do when we won the national championship. I had them prepare their minds for that moment and, sure enough, when we won a huge eruption let out.”

The culmination of the River City Spartans’ season was due to a season long effort on behalf of Ross to prepare for such moments.

Part of the strategy was the team’s schedule. Ross played his fourth grade against older kids as part of a strategy to introduce them to tough competition locally before hitting the regional and national tournaments.

“We played up a lot, and it really helped us out,” Ross said.

The River Spartans still managed to put in a 17-4 record despite playing older kids for much of the early season and finished the year ranked first by YBOA in Louisiana.

In many ways Ross said coaching fourth graders has more to deal with managing their mental state rather than pushing them to win.

“I really paid attention to managing their emotions and teaching them some life skills,” Ross said. “Once we were able to do that and focus on that, we took the pressure off them because they weren’t consistently thinking about winning.”

Ross came up with the idea to create the River City Spartans fourth graders AAU basketball team about a year ago with an aim at community building.

“The whole reason I started the organization was to teach life principles that will carry over in basketball,” Ross said. “I would preach to them all the time it is not always the person that wins and gets ahead or know the Xs and Os the best. It is the person that perseveres who wins when hard times hit. They are going to keep going. The person that is going to commit themselves to a certain plan — in this case the team and what we were teaching.”

The River City Spartans are comprised of 12 players from throughout the River Parishes. The team includes Cartarius Cosey, Daquan Bowser, Rommel Hardy, Alex Ross, Ty’ray Bartholomew, Jeremiah Keppard, Darius Hall, Quincy McGuffy, Jamon Downing, Mykel Dumas, Jarmaine Mitchell and Cameron Lumar.

Ross said his strategy in picking team members was not based entirely on their basketball acumen, but about picking the right kids who will benefit the most from being on the team.

“It is no challenge with coaching the best players,” Ross said. “You really aren’t doing anything. I said let’s take some kids that are not as talented and lets see how far we can get those kids and then we can say we did something.”

Unlike the stereotypical gruff, easily upset coaching style, the River Spartans took a more relaxed approach to coaching by not yelling at players or punishing them for making bad plays.

“It is constant encouragement throughout,” Ross said.

“I don’t believe in taking a kid out when they make a mistake, not at that moment, because I don’t want that etched in his brain. He knows he has screwed up. I don’t pull him out because everybody can see it and it validates to him he screwed up.”

As part of coaching Ross also relayed his life story to the children. Now a physician, Ross grew up in Edgard and graduated from West St. John High School.

“I want those kids to see that I was exactly like they are,” Ross said. “I grew up in Edgard, raised by my mother, pretty poor, didn’t have a whole lot of anything.

“My mother taught me how to value hard work. That is the first thing we teach them, not only how to work hard but to also work smart and use the resources they have at hand.”

Ross attended Arkansas State University and the University of Louisiana Lafayette on a football scholarship before going into medicine.

“I was not the greatest athlete, I was not the greatest student, but no one was going to outwork me,” Ross said. “I was going to work harder than everyone else and longer than everybody else. I told them if they did those two things — work harder and longer than everyone else — then they would be so far ahead.”

As part of his coaching, Ross said he encourage his players to take control of their lives and strive for their dreams.

“I don’t want to hear that your mom and dad split up, you don’t have a lot of money, you go to a small pubic school,” Ross said. “I don’t want to hear that. You can overcome all of those things.  It has been done and I am the person who tells you, ‘you can do that.’”