It was a baptism of fire as four-time BBL All-Star T.J. Walker made the transition from player to player/coach over the opening weekend of the BBL season. Walker's BiG Storage Cheshire Jets came up short against the Kularoos Plymouth Raiders and Sheffield Sharks. Despite 37 points from one of Walker's first recruits, Jayson Obazuaye, the Jets succumbed to a late run at the Plymouth Pavilions to lose 89-74 on Friday. That was followed by a 68-74 defeat at home to the Sharks, and for the second consecutive game it was only in the last two minutes that it slipped away from the Jets.

The performances left Walker a little uncertain as to his disposition when reflecting upon his first two games as a coach, "I enjoyed the weekend, but we didn't pull out two wins, so it wasn't that enjoyable ! It's been a great learning experience, and that's how I'm taking each day at the moment. At Plymouth I thought we played strong for the first 30 minutes and than ran out of gas. We changed up our defence, but we just didn't have enough in the tank. We struggled a bit with the rotation, players probably played a few more minutes than they'd have liked and that affected our defence. It will take time for the players to understand what we need them to do on defence." Defence wasn't the problem on Sunday as they kept the Sharks down to 74 points.

What cost the Jets that night was a shocking display from the free-throw line that would have resulted in abundant practice from the charity stripe in Monday's training session. "It was a very winnable game, but I thought that we only played well in spurts and we shot ourselves in the foot. We gave up too many easy shots, and they hit them. We scored only four from 17 shots at the foul line, and lost by six. If you miss that many free-throws you have to stop teams defensively. Sometimes you have a bad free-throwing team, but we can still do better than that, and we need to work round it if we aren't good from the line."

Walker takes his team to Glasgow on Sunday (5.00pm tip-off), where they will clash with the SAMG Verve Scottish Rocks; they hope to be travelling home minus the presence of a small animal on the team bus, "It's only a small monkey at the moment, but we need to get the monkey off our back and get that first win. I expect to win on Sunday, and it's important we get the win. We don't want to fall away from the pack at this stage. We'll lose some games early in the season, so we need to steal some wins as well."