Edwin Parr Composite’s senior girls basketball team is back on the court.
The girls opened the season with a convincing 47-21 win at home to Barrhead last Wednesday before traveling to Lloydminster for a tournament on the weekend where they won two of their four games.
“Barrhead is just getting started, we have a lot more returning players. We were a little more prepared to play,” said head coach Wade Hicks. “We got up 18 points and kind of backed off to work on our half court defense. Those games are a little harder to keep the kids up for (because) we’re used to pressing and pushing up on teams.”
If the girls were looking for more of a challenge, they found it in Lloydminster. The team had to make due without two of its starters, and they were up against stiff competition.
They dropped the first game to Ponoka by one point, and then turned around and beat Archbishop MacDonald by 15.
In both the win and the loss, the team was plagued by an inability to hit shots from up close.
“We just could not shoot the ball at all. We were missing around the rim left right and centre,” said the coach. “We still managed to beat (Macdonald) fairly easily, but that was the story of the weekend on our shooting. We were just hit and miss on everything.”
After that, the team lost a close game to Holy Rosary. Losing by four points to a perennial provincial powerhouse was an achievement in itself, though a win would have been nicer.
“It would have been nice to knock them off. We had the lead with 45 seconds to go, up by one, but we had a couple break downs in the end that they ended up grabbing.”
After that, the girls beat Cold Lake by eight points to end the weekend on a high note.
“It wasn’t a bad weekend. We definitely could have had some better results, but we were also missing two of our players that play pretty significant minutes,” said the coach in reference to Brooke Padlewski and Janaya Reimer. “They’re two of our bigger players. They grab a lot of rebounds and do a lot of work inside.”
The girls will now focus on getting ready for a home game against Whitecourt this Friday at 2 p.m.
