DARYL CORLETTO will take charge of Plymouth Raiders for the first time on Saturday night when they travel to Surrey Scorchers in the BBL Championship.

The Australian-born 34-year-old has been appointed Raiders’ new player-coach following the departure of Jay Marriott on Friday.

Marriott has left the city basketball team after two years as head coach. Plymouth-born Marriott took over in the Raiders hot-seat in September 2013 from Gavin Love.

However, the Pavilions-based outfit have failed to make the end-of-season play-offs for the last two years under Marriott, who finished with a 31.7 per cent win ratio in his first season and 43.6 per cent last term.

And this campaign, Raiders have yet to win, losing their opening three league games and crashing out of the BBL Cup at home to Bristol Flyers last weekend. They currently sit bottom of the BBL Championship, albeit having played less games than anyone else.

Corletto certainly believes he can turnaround Raiders’ fortunes and he is looking forward to the challenge. He believes he has learnt from watching current Australian coach Andrej Lemanis turnaround New Zealand Breakers.

“I’m in a great position to stop the winless start to the season going any further and to properly turn this club around,” said Corletto.

“I want to work with the club’s owners and management team to change the culture around the team, get the support back from the fans and sponsors and make the Raiders the team to challenge the dominance of Leicester and Newcastle in recent years.”

He added: “As a group we extremely excited and ready for tomorrow night’s game.

“Our first three games have been disappointing and it’s time we turned our season around.”

Raiders chairman Bob Widdecombe said: “We wanted to restructure the club’s coaching team, to allow the team the best chance to turn things around.

“If we are serious about making a run at a respectable league position this season, something had to be done now. We didn’t want to sit back and allow half of the season to slip away.”