The girls basketball team has continued to grow as the season has progressed.
“We don’t have the best record right now; however, we have definitely improved as the season has gone on, which makes me happy. The girls are still giving really good effort every night and every day at practice and stuff like that, so that’s the stuff that I like to see. Hopefully we pick up some more wins before the end of the season too,” said head coach Robert Nicoletti.
Throughout the season, the girls have tried to fix their mistakes through their practices. They run drills and work on what they got wrong. At the end, they focus on what needs to be done to ensure a win for the next game. They’ve been improving as the season been progressing, and with the work they are putting in, they are hoping to grow even more.
“The first portion of our practice every day is just a lot of like skill work. We definitely have seen the girls get better with just their fundamental skills individually, and then in terms of what we do as a team, we’re running our offense and running our defense and stuff like that. As a group, we’ve gotten better with each other and communicating with each other. In the beginning of the season, we kind of struggled, especially on defense, but we’ve gotten a lot better at that as the season has gone on,” Nicoletti said.
During practices, the girls have to focus on what’s most important. They like to figure out a course of action before they start practices. They work on strengthening both their offense and defense to improve their game.
Sometimes if our offense doesn’t run smoothly, we spend a lot of time on it, and then usually we don’t have defensive breakdowns anymore. We would have those sometimes and we would just focus more on defense in practice. Breakdowns are like if we let up a bunch of points or if we can’t figure out how to stop a certain team from scoring too much,” said junior Faith Standerski.
As the season has progressed, the girls have improved and shown it in certain games. Since the start of the season, they have fixed their errors and they’ve won multiple games.
“From this season, two stand out to me. The first is our game back in December at Grant, and Grant is a good team. We beat them at their place by three. That was a team who in our very first game of the year this season, they beat us by eighteen, and then we beat them by three. To me that showed that we improved and we’re playing better. Then over winter break, we played in a tournament and we beat Belvidere North up by Rockford, and they’re a really good team and they were having a really good year. We beat them by three. We just played really well and we had a great game, so it’s just fun to see us compete against a good team and see us come out with the win,” Nicoletti said.