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On every sports team, all players take on a role. As I am entering my third year playing on the varsity basketball team, I have earned a leadership role: I have to communicate with my teammates on and off the court because that is what my coach expects of me, being an upperclassman.
I try my best to take the underclassmen under my wing and guide them when running plays in games and practice, or just in general like bringing them along when we have pre game meals. Being a role model and a leader for the younger players is very important because they look up to me. I know what it is like to have bad experiences with older players on the team so I don’t ever want to make anybody else feel like that.
During my sophomore year, for the most part our season was successful. We did not have a winning record, but we beat a lot of teams that we lost to in previous years and qualified to play in the playoffs. Though last season was fairly good, Coach Holland will continue to have higher expectations for our team this year. He expects us to progress from last year and continue to get better by having a home playoff game and making it to the second round. These little differences show big changes and growth and would make our season substantially better from last season.
The women’s athletic programs here do not have as many people as needed, this year our basketball team only had 20 girls trying out. That is not nearly enough, 20 girls was barely enough to make a JV and a Varsity team and doesn’t give as wide of a variety when picking the teams. The low number of people on the team leaves us with a low amount of subs so our conditioning has to be top tier meaning each person should be able to play for long periods without getting tired. Having a small team in our conference puts us at a big disadvantage because we are in a 3A/4A conference, so the majority of the teams on our schedule are schools with hundreds or even thousands more people than we have attending West. Teams like Hoggard and Ashley have a full bench on both their JV and Varsity and they can rotate their players in and out and they don’t get tired. The advantage of having subs allows other teams to full-court press the whole game, our team does not get this luxury because it is exhausting running the whole floor for 32 minutes.
Along with our team being very small in numbers we are also small in size, the tallest player on the team is around 5”10, that is much smaller than the players we are competing with. But, the scarcity in the post is made up for in our strong back court, there are three returning guards including: junior Jahyra Mastry, senior Hailey Woodard, and myself. We might be small in size but that will not stop us from achieving success this season.
I have high expectations for the team this year, we are going into the season with almost the whole team returning and we haven’t done anything but grown in skill. Over the summer we were in the gym almost every other day continuing to get better and refine my skills along with my teammates. When training we would do drills that would be helpful to apply during game situations like shooting quick off the dribble and spot up, improving ball handling, finishing around the rim, and conditioning. I have high hopes going into the season and I am excited to play a game I love with my best friends.
