After attending basketball camp last week, soon-tobe senior Lara Hutton already noticed a difference between her new varsity girls coach at Excelsior Springs and her previous one.

“I’d say we’re really getting after it this year,” Hutton said July 23. “There’s a lot more running, a lot more conditioning.”

As The Standard recently reported, Levi King is the new varsity girls coach. The 2020 Excelsior Springs graduate succeeds JD Biermann.

Conditioning is a cornerstone of King’s coaching philosophy, he suggested.

“I’m one of those guys where I refuse to lose a game because we ran out of legs in the fourth quarter or because we weren’t conditioned well enough maybe to run a press as often as we could have,” King said July 23.

King, a former assistant to Biermann, also suggested his emphasis on fitness is nothing new to Hutton or other returning players.

“I’ve always been the coach that was kind of the hardest on them,” King said.

Because there’s a gap of roughly three months between camp and the…