Hoquiam’s girls basketball team struggled at times last season, but the young group is bringing a little more experience to the table that the coaching staff hopes will put the Grizzlies in position to compete for a playoff spot.
The Grizzlies struggled to a 2-6 record in their league and had trouble getting shots to fall. Hoquiam will have to deal with the losses of Isabel Hernandez, who is entering her first season at Grays Harbor College, and Casey Mode who averaged 5.4 points a game.
The team will be putting last year’s leading scorer on the court again this year, however. Lone senior Karlie Krohn averaged 6.5 points a game and will play an important role as team leader on a team that will be anchored by juniors.
One of those juniors who will help Krohn in leading the charge is Rylee Vonhof. The 5-foot-10 junior averaged 6.3 points per game and will be an important part of the team’s interior offense.
Unfortunately for the Grizzlies, Vonhof will be their only true post player on a team that looks to rely on speed.
Hoquiam head coach Mark Maxfield said he plans on getting a lot of buckets in transition this year.
“We’re not very big, so we’re going to have to be fast,” he said. “We’re going to have to get on them and force a lot of turnovers so we’re going to be an uptempo team.”
Jade Cox, Maya Jump and Kylee Bagwell will likely join Krohn and Vonhof to form Hoquiam’s starting five, but it is still anyone’s guess who will be first off the bench.
The Grizzlies had only 12 practices ahead of their season-opening game against Capital on Tuesday, but the coaching staff is taking a close look at the roster in these practices to determine who will see the most time on the floor.
“The girls know that I am a huge believer in competition for positions,” he said. “It’s about who rises to the top. It’s not how you start, it’s how you end. That’s always been our philosophy.”
One of the areas that the Grizzlies hope to improve upon before the end of the season is conditioning. The short turnaround time between the start of practice and the start of the season may provide a challenge at first, but recent practices have put a heavy emphasis on conditioning, with drills that put players’ speed and agility to the test.
Getting in shape will go a long way to a successful season with a team that plans to play man-to-man defense and occasionally go into a press to force the turnovers that will fuel the transition game.
The strategy is still a work in progress, but when the dust settles, Maxfield expects to finish as high as second in the league standings.
The early portion of the schedule may be tough for the Grizzlies, but he is still optimistic that the challenges they face in November will make them stronger for the home stretch of the season in February.
“We may struggle early. We have some very tough non-league games against bigger schools, 2A and 3A schools,” he said. “We’re going to struggle early, but that’s OK because we wan to be playing well at the end.”
