This year Salish Kootenai College head women’s basketball coach Juan Perez will enter the start of the AIHEC Tournament in a different role with his team.

Perez, whose brother Silas Perez, has coached all season in his absence when he was focusing on coaching the Lady Pirates, will take a back seat to Silas as the assistant coach for the remainder of the year as they prepare for AIHEC in New Town, North Dakota.

“He is the one that is traveled with the team all season,” Juan Perez said of his brother. “He will run their practice and I am going to let him coach. I’ll be his assistant this year.”

With winning a national championship comes an undefined swagger but it also makes it tough to repeat as his team gets ready for the season’s biggest stage.

“I don’t know if it is a swagger but our girls know what it takes to win that tournament,” Juan Perez said. “Having girls with that experience makes trying to win a second consecutive AIHEC title a little easier. We know that we will have a target on our backs and we have to be mindful that teams will be trying to do everything they can to beat us. We have to make sure we don’t’ enter the tournament overconfident.”

This year the tournament will be held in New Town, N.D. and Perez said the fact his team knows what to expect entering the tournament will be a plus even though it’s a different venue from last year in South Dakota.

“That is what we tried to do with the AIHEC Tournament is have that standardization of knowing what to expect from the tournament,” Perez said. “I guess being around it long enough and our coaching is the same, we know what we are going to expect and what they are going to do. I think we just work hard on standardizing the tournament so that there are no surprises.”

Now that Perez will transition back into an assistant coach’s role, he said during his time as a coach with the Lady Pirates his focus was strictly on Polson until now.

“I have been totally focused on the Lady Pirates and I haven’t really been to a practice with the Lady Bison until this week,” Perez said. “Monday was my first day back with them and getting back into the gym. The process of transitioning from one team to another begins.”

Juan said he and Silas are excited about the prospect of capturing back-to-back AIHEC titles.

“With SKC, the Lady Bison and their players have a knowledge of the game that is a little different from the high school players I was coaching,” Perez said. “The players have been through the system with us and they know what our expectations are. Silas has maintained the standards and expectations of the program h and I have built together over the years.”