Finding a new identity can be as easy or as difficult as taking a chance. Platte Valley girls basketball coach Terri DeJong has been spending a lot of practice time trying to impart such a message to her experienced but tentative team.
The Broncos lost big-time scorer Alison Cheney to graduation, and DeJong is looking for a few new names to start pulling the trigger in her place.
“Last year, it looked like we were setting our offense up for one person, but we really weren’t,” DeJong said. “The kids just really looked for Alison. Now, in practice, we’ll keep running our offense and running our offense and I wonder who they are trying to get the ball to.”
After showing the team a videotape of a scrimmage in which Platte Valley took just 10 shots in 10 minutes, the pace has picked up. Seniors Kayla Warehime, Danielle Zehnder, Whitney Smith and Jamie Ehrlich have spent years playing together, and their trip to the Class 3A state tournament gave them a taste of the best competition out there.
The Broncos will have their hands full in the Patriot League’s East Division with teams such as Eaton and Valley on the schedule, and replacing Cheney won’t be easy. But things could be worse. Centauri, which won the state championship, graduated five talented athletes.
“I’m crossing my fingers that Centauri graduated all of its big players,” joked St. Mary’s Academy coach Phil Gentry, whose team lost in the elite eight to Centauri. “I’m getting tired of seeing them.”
Centauri, minus four starters, will need to get its new group up and running in a hurry, and a brutal early schedule will be a major test. But coach Dave Forster gave his bench plenty of playing time last season, and he isn’t worried about putting points on the scoreboard.
“We have Marcie Cooley back, our leading scorer, so we’ll be OK on points,” Forster said. “We’re working on getting our press back to where we want it. It all starts with the press for us.”
Centauri will have to get past Pagosa Springs and Monte Vista in order to win the Intermountain League title.
In the Metropolitan, making it to the state tournament could mean simply surviving a brutal league schedule. Faith Christian lost three seniors and its coach, but former assistant Debbie Candelaria takes over a team that features Brittany Long, Kayla Endes and Cortney Bray, a 6-foot-2 post player who should be fully recovered from a knee injury by the holiday break.
Candelaria will put her own imprint on the Eagles, but she plans to follow a simple mantra.
“If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” she said of a team that played for the title in 2005 and reached the semifinals last season. “We’ll run a diverse offense, but when you have guards that can shoot and a true post, that makes it fun.”
Machebeuf will welcome the return of speedy point guard Cheri Palmer, who didn’t play her junior season, and Kent Denver and Denver Christian also will challenge for the league title. Holy Family, with Lindsay Halligan and Jessica Giltner, should challenge as well.
