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Nevada Lady Tigers hope for competitive season
NEVADA, Mo. -- Nevada Lady Tigers head basketball coach Brent Bartlett is heading into his 16th season as a coach -- his 13th at Nevada High School -- with very high hopes for the season. "We have a group of girls that are very athletic and competitive," he said.
The Lady Tigers are returning just one starter from last year's team, but that has not had a significant impact on Bartlett's hopes to build a very competitive team from this year's group. Despite having just that one returning starter, the Lady Tigers will be returning a total of eight players with varsity experience from last year.
"Allie Irwin is our only returning starter. If you just look at that, that would be kind of glim, but look at all these girls that played varsity last year. I mean, Heather Thomas, Daven Smith, Lauren Klinksick and then my two sophomores were almost starters, they came off the bench, Olivia Culbertson and Tiffani Long."
The Lady Tigers did take a few hits from graduation last year in losing LeeAnn Stone, Jordan Bell, Taylor Means, Reba Hurst and Jessica Harper, but still come into the year with a very strong crop of athletes. Sophomores Olivia Culbertson and Tiffani Long nearly became starters last season as freshman coming in off the bench, showing very strong abilities all over the court. Lauren Klinksick, Heather Thomas and Daven Smith all showed tremendous improvements over the course of last season as well, on their way to working for a starting spot.
Added to those players will be a number of new faces to the varsity squad, most of which came from last year's very strong JV team. Sophomores Megan Harper, Marisa Hughes, Nikki O'Bryan and Paije Gibbs are all projected to get some playing time as well as freshman Tori Dahmer.
"We feel we have a good balance of good varsity experience with newcomers from our JV, not newcomers to our system," Bartlett said. "So we're excited about most of the JV and varsity girls understanding and knowing the system that we enstilled in them and put in them last year of the way we want them to play."
The biggest goal that Bartlett has set for his team coming into the 2009 season will be to improve their perimeter shooting. Last year's squad had very few outside shooting threats and was never really able to do much scoring from the outside, creating a number of problems on a team that had a substantial lack of size compared to a number of its opponents. "We struggled from the outside last year -- actually the last couple of years -- and it would help just to open some things out if we can hit some outside shots," Bartlett said.
The Lady Tigers have placed a major part of their focus on a slightly different part of the game during this year's practices thus far, however. Fundamentals and conditioning have been among the top priorities in the first two weeks of practice in order to fine-tune the way that Bartlett is hoping his team will be able to play the game.
"Im looking forward to the season, I know the girls have been working really hard," Bartlett said. "A big part of the first few weeks is conditioning and getting themselves in shape to play the game the way we want to play it and that's not always fun. It's not always easy."
The Lady Tigers will be heading into the season looking to play a very aggressive and quick style that is design to keep up a fast pace to the game and hopefully wear teams down with their depth and rotation. A very agile and athletic squad has aided Bartlett's efforts in developing that style of play thus far, but at the same time, he openly acknowledged the fact that there may be instances in which that style may not play or may even backfire.
"It is an aggressive style. There's going to be times where we may look just absolutely silly and give up some layups, but then there's going to be more times that not that we're hoping to wear out teams with our pressure and rotating people in," Bartlett said. "More times than not, we're going to do a lot good things and get some turnovers."
The Lady Tigers finished last year with a 10-17 record that was very deceiving and did not impact their abilities to play the game as they continued to make a number of improvements throughout the year. By the end of the season, the confidence of what was a very young and inexperienced team had come up by a tremendous amount, Bartlett said, and they ultimately went on to play for a district championship against a very talented Webb City team that went on to finish as the Missouri State Class 4 runner-up.
The Lady Tigers will continue to try to improve their game throughout the remaining preseason practices with the goal of being able to impose their will on this year's opposition. Their first test will come in the form of a tough Carl Junction tournament that is set to start on Nov. 30.
"We play some really quality teams and I think we're going to be very competitive with those teams," Bartlett said of the season opening tournament. "Some of those teams really took it to us last year and we're looking forward to playing them again just being a year older and a year more confident."