DOWAGIAC — When the Dowagiac girls basketball team heads to Cassopolis for its season opener against the Rangers, it will have a new, but familiar coach running the program.

Former Chieftain standout Jason Turner takes over the varsity squad from Brent Nate, who coached Dowagiac for three seasons.

Turner, a 2011 Dowagiac graduate, was an assistant coach under Nate and helped the Chieftains go 7-13, the team’s most wins since 2006.

He would like nothing more than to continue moving the program forward. That will be somewhat of a challenge as Dowagiac lost its top scorers and rebounders from last year — Kellyn Daly, Taylor Pye and Amiyah Smith.

“This is my first head coaching job,” Turner said. “I had a lot of experience the last three years learning from Brent, taking some things from Coach (Danum) Hunt from when I was in high school.”

Turner already knows that to build a program, he will have to start from the ground up.

“I want to start building a younger program, so I am starting a third- through sixth-grade lead in Dowagiac for the girls,” he said. “I am pretty excited to bring that back to Dowagiac and to start building the program that way, as well as what we have built the past three years.”

While the Chieftains lost most of their scoring and rebounding, it does return several players with varsity experience, including Allie Conner, Hayden First and Greta Whitaker. Conner, a junior, is a three-year starter for Dowagiac.

“We are going to be young when it comes to basketball experience,” Turner said. “Our basketball knowledge is a little low right now, so we are going to have to work on that.”

Turner said that the completion of last season, Nate and the staff talked about what needed to get accomplished during the offseason.

“We talked about fundamentals,” he said. “Handling the ball and protecting it. We need to be able to handle the pressure. We need to build up our guard play,”

Torie Lowe returns as an assistant coach after a year’s absence.

Turner will make his debut at Cassopolis on Dec. 3.