SUN City Plumbing Buccaneers players have been warned to shape up under conditions to Ray Evans’ re-appointment as head coach.

The Buccs’ Working Committee re-installed Evans to the top job for a fourth successive term on Tuesday night.

Player discipline, attitude, commitment and development were the main points the committee outlined as areas for radical improvement.

Evans acknowledged player discipline affected this year’s campaign and vowed to tackle the issues head on. “At times it was an issue, but every team has certain issues like that where sometimes players don’t get on with each other,” he said.

“The bigger issue was we lost games and the confidence got sapped. When that happened we looked around at other people to blame. We’ll be sitting down together to set some rules that the team has to stick by.”

The Buccs finished 11th in 2011, missing the finals for only the second time in their history.

Evans, who led the team to consecutive semi-finals in 2009 and 2010, felt he had unfinished business with the position.

“We’ve identified we’ve got a lot of things to work on,” he said. “One thing I didn’t want to do was just leave the team like that and seem like I was walking away. “We’re going to start earlier this year to get things right earlier for the start of the season.”

Buccs operations manager Scott Rubery said the committee was delighted to welcome Evans back for another stint. “Ray’s appointment gives us great stability for our program,” he said.

“We look forward to working with him and the coaching staff in the 2012 season to make the Buccs the number one team in the SBL,” he said.

Player depth was an obvious problem for the Buccs this year following the departure of Daniel Thomas and Tom Witts at the end of 2010.

Evans said new Australian talent was high on his priority list. “We’re starting to look now, we definitely want to bolster our line-up and have some depth coming off the bench,” he said.

“We’ve got some feedback from players who may be keen to come here.”

Michael Lay is confirmed as an import again next year. Evans was non-committal on Todd Brown’s return to fill the second import spot.

“We’ll definitely look at him (Brown) again, but what we need to do is get our Australian contingent right and then find out what kind of import we really need.”

Young Buccs Luke Wrensted and Jack Stone displayed steady progress in 2011. Evans said he would look to blood more juniors, provided they were ready for the demands of the SBL.