THOMASVILLE — There’s just something about high school sports.

New Brookwood boys basketball coach Drew Giudice had spent the last few years coaching in the college ranks, and even got to be a part of one of the sport’s biggest stages as an assistant at Belmont University: The NCAA tournament. 

Yet, Giudice still felt the allure of the high school game, and on Monday, he officially returned to that level. As a former four-year varsity player at Maclay School in Tallahassee, he hopes to being his experience at both levels to help build up Brookwood’s boys program.

“I had a phenomenal experience playing high school basketball,” Giudice said. “Everybody sees March Madness — I saw it up close and personal. It’s really cool but at the same time, there’s a purity about high school basketball. It’s untouchable in a lot of ways. These kids are playing with guys that have been their best friends since kindergarten.”

One of the first things the Warriors’ new coach did was meet with his team for the first time. It looks to be pretty young for the upcoming season, with three seniors. A big aspect of the job that was attractive was the chance to build the program throughout, not just at the varsity level. It’s an approach that has seen some recent success at Brookwood in the form of the soccer and girls basketball programs.

“We’ve been talking about how we want to build the program all the way through, even with the lower levels — Using that for sustained success,” Giudice said. “In college basketball, there’s a lot of transfers. There’s 800 transfers every year, so you have a lot of roster turnover. For me, being able to work with sixth graders all the way up until senior night, it was an easy call.”

To do that, he will be taking pages out of the playbooks of two very different situations he was a part of. At Belmont, Giudice served under longtime head coach Rick Byrd, who has been at the helm there since 1986. At Lee University, his most recent stop, he was part of first-year coach Bubba Smith’s staff.

“Coach Smith was phenomenal in trying to come in and implement a culture,” Giudice said. “It was really impressive to see — putting your thumb print on the program. At Belmont, it was such a well-oiled machine. (Coach Byrd) had been doing it for 30 years. That’s one of the rare programs in the country that doesn’t rely on transfers that much.”

Giudice has an analytics-based approach to the game and wants to implement an up-tempo offense that heavily implements the three-pointer. However, with no shot clock in high school, there will certainly be more time to be selective on those shots.

However long the process takes, one thing can start immediately: Instilling the competitive nature that has endured since his playing days.

“When I played, It was one of my goals to have people hate playing against me,” he said. “I want to instill that. I want them to hate playing us. It’ll take some time, but certainly, we’ll get there as soon as we can.”