December is always a busy month for us. We had a lot of work to do and very little time to get it done. We have already played half of our 24 scheduled games in the first several weeks of the season.
Now that we are heading into league play, things will slow down for us a little bit and we can get more into a routine. Our pre-season went great. Of course, we’d love to come into league with a spotless record, but our team has shown great growth over our first 11 games and have improved some areas of weakness.
We knew coming into the year that this was a team that was capable of scoring a lot of points. We have a lot of girls on the roster who can score and routinely play 5 girls at a time who are capable of stepping outside and making 3-pointers. However, our main focus over the past month or so has been improving on the defensive end.
All of that work really came together for us at North Valley this past weekend. We played back to back games where we were able to see tremendous growth in both the half court and full court on defense. If we can consistently be great defensively, we will be tough to beat throughout the year.
One major area of concern that has been better in recent games has been our rebounding. Our team does not have a lot of size, so that is an area of concern for us. We have worked hard on making that a point of emphasis in every practice and every game. It is still an area we have to work at every day, but the improvement has been great. Our kids have gotten much tougher and are starting to really take pride in their toughness on the boards. We have been able to shuffle a lot of kids in and out of games so far which has helped us determine some rotations that seem to work well for us.
Heading into league, our goals remain the same…win a league title and advance to the state tournament. Our league is much improved this year, so that task is a tall one, but it is a challenge our girls are excited to take on. We need to continue to improve our defensive effort and our offensive execution to make that happen.
-Coach Chris Schofield
