Bryce Brown is unquestionably one of the most entertaining players plying his trade this season in Israel as the guard has not only been shooting lights out but is also the inspirational leader and star for Nes Ziona as the first month of the campaign comes to a close.

The Auburn product arrived in the Holy Land after a season with JL Bourg in the LNB French League and has taken quickly become a force to be reckoned with especially after scoring 33 points in a much needed 101-83 win over Hapoel Gilboa Galil for Nes Ziona’s first victory of the season. After losing its opening three games to the league’s top clubs, Head Coach Amit Sherf rallied the troops and finally picked up his first win on the club’s bench to the crowd’s delight after having been in charge of Hapoel Holon last season.

Next up for Nes Ziona is a Friday afternoon date at Lev HaMoshava (1:30pm) with Hapoel Galil Elyon as they will look to win back-to-back games against the two Galilee teams after having fallen to the likes of Maccabi Tel Aviv, Hapoel Jerusalem and Maccabi Ramat Gan.

The 27-year old Brown has shown tremendous spirit and ability thus far and is near the top of a number of statistical categories including points (19.8), assists (5) and efficiency (19.5) making him clearly marked man if Nes Ziona is to be stopped. With that, Sherf and Nes Ziona’s success will be directly linked to Brown as the Stone Mountain, Georgia native wants to make sure that he is doing all that he can to help the team reach the highest of heights.

“I’m not going out every game focusing on getting 33 points,” Brown stated. “Right now I am just trying to turn things around for the team and do whatever I can to just get some wins. I would feel much better when we are over .500 or near the top of the rankings in the league. My goal everyday is to make sure that I am going my best to put the team in the best position to make the playoffs and just keep everyone happy and everyone in a good mood.”

“I want to let everyone know that we are a good team and we can compete. We just had our first three games against the best three teams in the league. It prepared us and we found a rhythm in the win over Gilboa that we can build off of and that will allow us to get better.”

Before chalking up the victory over Gilboa, Nes Ziona fell big time at Ramat Gan to the tune of 108-84 in a game that they were not competitive, did not play a lick of defense but were also missing Ricky Lindo who suffered a minor hand injury that kept him out of action for the defeat.

“Having Ricky back was big,” Brown said. “We all know what he does and he’s probably the most athletic guy in the league as far as I have seen so far. It’s just his heart, his will and he just finds a way to get it done for us. But I have to also mention a lot of people who stepped up. Yair Kravits was huge, Itay Segev was huge defensively. A lot of guys stepped in and did their work. If it wasn’t for Kravits I probably wouldn’t have had the game that I had because he found me and got a lot of assists off of me. I salute him.”

It’s not a simple task to get back into the swing of things after a tough loss and Sherf explained how he saw the situation coming into the club’s fourth game without a win.

“There is an advantage after a loss like we had and that was to play another game very quickly so we don’t dwell on the defeat. Right after the Ramat Gan game on Monday, we worked on video the next day and then on the court and I told the guys that I can see everyone is very focused. I knew that they would react well, but the key is to take that and to keep improving from practice to practice as we can be a bit more relaxed when doing so after a win.”

Brown also spoke about what went down and how the team was able to get off of the mat, “After that loss, we didn’t stop believing in each other any less or any more. It was more of coach emphasizing after showing us some film and certain plays that he asked, ‘guys is this what you call hustling? Is this what you call fighting? This is not winning basketball’.”

“We had a meeting with the coach and after that we had a meeting with the rest of the team just letting them know that we have to try and turn things around, pick up the intensity, coaches aren’t happy with us. So let’s do more. If everybody can look in the mirror and you can say let’s do 2-3% better then let’s not point any fingers at anyone. It’s not one person’s fault that we are 0-3 but if can all do 2-3% better it would translate to wins.”

While Israeli hoop aficionados may be getting acquainted to Brown, Sherf had him on his radar for quite some time and that he has already seen some new aspects to his game which will make him an even more important player for the club now and perhaps for an even bigger franchise down the road.

“When he was in Poland and I was at Holon, I was looking into bringing in Bryce but it didn’t work out. Nes Ziona had two games against him in Europe so we were able to follow him pretty well. He is a 2 that is a scorer and not so much a creator which is something we would like from the 2 so that we can also do pick and rolls. What I am even more happy about than the 33 points he scored was his incredible defense and a lot of how he created. He’s not going to shoot 6/8 every game, but he was able to make a number of good passes to his teammates and he can do that every game. He knows that and we are working on this every day. The combination of scoring and creating will be the key to his success because he won’t go 6/8 from deep every game.”

With Galil Elyon coming to town, Nes Ziona will once again look to fill up the Lev HaMoshava Arena and feed off of the energy that the fans provided in the win over Gilboa.

“We felt the atmosphere in the Arena and the fans came up huge for us especially when we fed off of that a lot in the second quarter of the game. We fed off of that a lot and if we can create a good home court advantage like we did in this win then it will be hard for most teams to come in here and win. It would definitely help us for sure.”