By Kris Smith
As soon as all his current players were back home with their families and safe, he immediately began his preparations for next season and started to identify potential members of next seasons squad.
However, uncertainty is high across the sporting world with every sport affected by the crisis but he and the club are already preparing for next season and will be ready for what Pacha believes will be the club’s “hardest challenge yet.”
He said: “Well right now, we are just trying to build for next season.
“We know we are going to have a lot of challenges and we know it is going to be our hardest challenge yet to overcome as a club but so far we have had a great response from our fans and from our sponsors.
“So, we are hoping that we can carry all that positivity into next season and despite all the uncertainty right now, we are planning that there will be a season and we are hoping that this blows over sooner rather than later.”
Due to Coronavirus affecting the entire globe, the Stars boss has admitted that the market is understandably slow just now, as players wait to learn more about the current situation before agreeing where they will play next.
Pacha continued: “There are ongoing talks with players just now, but the market is slow for us right now because of all the uncertainty.
“But we are pushing our season tickets and when we push them and our sponsorship, that is to help raise funds to use for next season’s budget and our supporters have given us a fantastic start to build from.
“So, things are good considering everything but this summer probably will not be as consistent with a normal season, so we want to encourage our fans to keep buying season tickets and we want our sponsors to continue to support us and that will keep us on track with where we want to be.”
Just like every season, there will be changes to the roster of every team in the league and coaches will want to upgrade certain areas of their squad and the Canadian coach has already picked out some areas for improvement.
Pacha added: “I thought overall we had a hard working team and I do think we had some good spots but there are some areas that we would like to get better at.
“But I think that the consistency of our team was not very good, even at times in the second half of the season when I thought we played a lot better.
“Also, our defence-core suffered at times when we had injuries and we saw that losing Kris Inglis for a while kind of hurt our core, as well when we lost Reilly O’Connor.
“So, we seemed to struggle in that aspect and that was a bit frustrating as a coach, fighting through injuries but our offence also lacked consistency.
“I thought in some games we created a lot of chances but in others, we looked like we were going through the motions and I would have liked to seen a bit more fluidity upfront.
“Even though we had more offensive creativity this year, we made those changes in December and from there we scored a lot more goals in the second half of the season.”
“Right now, we are just focusing on the set way we want to play, which is fast and we want to play with some skill upfront.
“We also want to have some more depth and maybe be able to move the puck a bit quicker than we could this year.
“So, that is another area we maybe want to improve, the distribution from our d-men to our forwards and playing well defensively.”
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