“I still have times when it’s tough. I just try to work through it,” Webster says. “When I play basketball, I don’t think about anything [other] than what’s at hand.”

Webster is looking forward to tipping off the season for another reason as well: to prove that his performance last year was an anomaly.

After finishing second on the Crimson in scoring and earning an All-Ivy honorable mention as a sophomore, Webster had a disappointing junior campaign. His scoring average more than halved—dropping from 13.0 points per game to 4.5—and he attempted just 15 free throws (down from 123 a season before).

“I was getting caught up in people trying to tell me what to do, and I was trying to do different things,” Webster says. “I don’t know, it was just a lot of things going on mentally, and I was just not in tune.”

Over this past summer, Webster added another element to his on-court training. For hours, Webster pored over game tapes from a season ago, trying to pinpoint exactly what went wrong.

“It just looked like I wasn’t myself,” he says. “I wasn’t taking the shots that I usually take, and I wasn’t making the shots that I usually make.”

If the Crimson is going to compete for a conference title, all of that will have to change—something of which both Webster and Amaker are well aware.

“We’re going to need Christian to play very well for us,” Amaker says. “We need for him to be efficient, make open shots, to be as he was as a sophomore. That’s what we’re expecting, what we need, and he knows it.”

With the backing of his teammates, the co-captain believes he can return to his old ways.

“That my teammates want me to lead the team is the best compliment you can get,” Webster says. “I feel really confident right now in the team and myself.”

—Staff writer Martin Kessler can be reached at martin.kessler@college.harvard.edu.