Losing eight seniors to graduation could cause a coach to look at a season as a rebuilding year. Instead, Steve Yoder prefers to look at the 2012-13 basketball season as a reloading year for his Emmaus team.

Last season, Emmaus won the Lehigh Valley Conference championship, but was denied a trip to the PIAA tournament when they lost a heartbreaking 60-56 game to Easton. With that in mind, the Hornets have a target on their backs, but are also in the mood to seek a little revenge.

"The truth is that the expectations in the program haven't changed at all," said Yoder. "We still believe that we should be in the hunt for the division title, that we should be in the hunt for the LVC playoffs and that we can make a run for districts. So the names have changed, but the program is at a level now that we should be consistently in the hunt."

Yoder is entering his fifth season at the helm of Emmaus basketball and is touting this year's group of seniors Dan Brndjar, Kane McGovern, Gabe Shankweiler and Derek Tannous as the best that he's ever seen. That sort of confidence in his senior players leads to a lot of optimism for the upcoming season.

"I walked into the gym at 2:59 today and they're already running their laps, without a single coach in here; they're already doing what they know they should do," gushed a very proud Yoder. "That's never happened and that's a tribute to their leadership."

The Emmaus team had an impressive showing in the summer leagues and while Yoder doesn't think that is necessarily a precursor to how the season plays out, he does believe that his team gathered a lot of confidence from the experience. The task now is to take that success and carry it over to the regular season, which opens Friday at home against East Stroudsburg South.

Yoder believes that depth is what made his team so good last season and that his players are going to be able to reap the rewards of waiting their turn to be leaders this season.

"I am so excited for this group, because a lot of these guys were good enough to have started and played on teams in the Valley last year, but because we had such a unique and talented senior class, their playing time was limited," said Yoder. "Now, it's all about them, they're the center of attention and they're really anxious to show everybody in the Valley that we were more than just that senior class."

Besides his seniors this season, Yoder believes that juniors Joe Nicolini and Nate Feiertag are going to be players who should contribute to the success of the team.

With everybody gunning to knock Emmaus out of their spot on the top of the West Division and to dethrone the LVC Champions, the Hornets have a target on their back. But not going to the PIAA Tournament was a definite disappointment and it was the Easton Red Rovers who ended that run for Emmaus. Is there a little revenge to be had?

"There's a little bit of sour grapes because of that Easton game. I really believe that if we got into states, that we could have done something special," said Yoder. "I haven't really gotten into the Easton factor too much with this team yet, but this is a highly competitive team, and I'm sure they remember last year."

The first of two meetings with Easton comes this Saturday in a game that will be played at Freedom High School.