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Despite a two-week delay due to Covid-19, the girls’ basketball team is excited for a new season and to welcome Austin Hadley as their new assistant coach .
“I think he will be a good addition to our team,” said senior Melissa Murillo. “He’s a good coach. He’s very nice and he works great with the girls. We are very excited for him.”
While the girls already think highly of Hadley, he continues to bring many different qualities to the girls basketball program.
“Honestly, he’s really personable, and he teaches here so he has interactions with girls in other ways than just basketball,” said head girls basketball coach Taylor Christensen. “He’s a fun guy and obviously he’s played a lot of sports in high school. His mom was a coach, so I think he knows the game of basketball as well, but mostly just a good attitude and a person the girls can go to to talk to.”
Having a good attitude and being really personable, along with other qualities, is exactly why Christensen thinks that Hadley will be great for the younger girls.
“I think he will be good for the younger girls because he teaches freshman math, so he does deal with them quite a bit,” Christensen said.
While Christensen thinks that Hadley will be a great coach for the freshman/sophomore team, he has already started thinking of what he wants to accomplish this season.
“First off, I want the girls to have fun,” Hadley said. “Obviously, we want to win. Winning is fun to me, but I want them to have fun. I want them to learn about basketball. I want to have them see why I love the game and have them develop their own reason for loving basketball. I also want them to learn how to compete and to just feel like they gained something from basketball.”
Since Hadley has already thought of his goals for this season he also has to come up with ways to accomplish them.
“I want to have them understand the fundamentals and become really good at fundamentals because I think that is where you start,” said Hadley.
While Hadley is going to focus on fundamentals, which will immensely help the girls, having some playing experience will also help.
“The one thing that obviously is going to help us is that we are a year older,” said Christensen.
Even though focusing on fundamentals and having playing experience will help, the girls need to be ready to put in the work.
“We have to focus on running the plays well and better team effort,” said Murillo. “We have to work hard every day at practice and be willing to learn more and be coachable.”
While the girls have to be willing to work hard they also have to be willing to focus on many other aspects that will help the team.
“Just trying to focus more on the team and trusting each other more so we can go far in the season,” said Murillo. “[Also] trying to get more wins than last season but we have to focus on everything.”
Even though there is so much for the girls to work on to get ready for this season and what it will bring, they also have to get their mentality in the right place.
“We are all ready and energetic, but we are all nervous and scared for this season,” Murillo said. “Everyone knows how it’s been the past few years, and it’s been really rough, so we don’t want to have that mentality that it’s going to be rough.”
While the girls can’t have the mentality that it’s going to be rocky, they also have to realize that every year is different, as well as every team, including their own.
“[The mentality] is not as determined and going in like ‘yeah we lost to this team last year we are going to lose,” said junior Eryn Briggs. “But it’s a whole different team, it’s whole new people who are going to be playing. They don’t know how we play.”
