Zach Spiker Makes Debut Tonight As Drexel Head Coach

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The college basketball season starts tonight and five of the City 6 basketball teams will be in action.

That includes Drexel who will play its first game under new head coach Zach Spiker. The Dragons open the season on the road against Monmouth and Spiker is ready to get things started.

"Obviously, the start of every season brings a level of excitement no matter where you are," Spiker tells KYW Newsradio. "But with this transition and being our first year at Drexel, our family, I think our players and everyone around the program is excited to get this season started and get our process started publicly. We've been working for many months now on establishing our brand and what our daily grind is going to be about. We have an opportunity for people to see what we are trying to become very quickly."

Listen: Zach Spiker with KYW's Matt Leon

Spiker, who spent the last seven seasons as the head coach at Army, replaced Bruiser Flint at Drexel. Flint was let go after the Dragons went just 6-25 a season ago. Spiker talks about what the 2016-17 Dragons need to focus on to have success.

"We need to be very, very good with the basketball," Spiker says. "We need to execute and run our action to get the best possible look and put our defense in a position to get set. I think when we've done that, we have some size and strength in and around the basket that it's tough to score over, we can defend at a decent rate."

Spiker says his team will face a big challenge in this opener against Monmouth.

"First games of the year can always be a little bit of an unknown bag in what you're going to see," he says. "I think with Monmouth, quite frankly, the number of players they have returning, they may do a couple new things, but this is a program that's very established, with King Rice who has been their coach for a number of years. They are going to go with their top eight, nine guys, all are back from last year, a team that, frankly, probably should've been in the (NCAA) Tournament and they had the body of work of a team deserving to get in the tournament."

Monmouth went 28-8 last year. The Hawks advanced into the second round of the NIT.

Friday night's game starts at 7:00pm.