Last season the women’s Basketball team took first in their league. This year the team looks to open up the season strong and defend their title. Sophomore Hunter Hopkins stated “We lost eight sophomores from last year and only had three healthy returning sophomores.” The team this season is new compared to last year.In a regular team, most freshmen would be used sparingly, allowing them to gain experience before receiving the real load of play-time, but according to coach Mel Stubblefield, the team is “hurt right now, we have some injuries, we have some people out for a while.” This being the case the freshmen on the team will have to play a bigger role than normally expected.
The team kicked off their season with a long road trip to Coeur d’Alene, Saturday Nov. 22 to take on the North Idaho team. Before the trip, Coach Stubblefield said the game “is going to be a big one, we hope to go in there and just compete, they’re a really, really tough team, they have been competing nationally as well.”
The team had the opportunity to test their form during some recent scrimmages over the past few weeks. Hopkins stated “We learned that one of our main issues has been getting in shape, we really need to take that to heart because we could’ve ran and won some games.” This is a problem many teams face after a fairly long off-season that can only be fixed with time and effort in and out of practice.
As this is a new team it takes time for players to establish roles for themselves on the team such as “go-to player” or “spark off the bench.” This can also come in as an advantage as it will force the team to play as one unit and not as different players playing their role. “We have a number of players that I think can step up, each week and each game is going to be different,” stated Stubblefield in regards to whether or not a star player has established themselves in practice yet.