Lady Tigers begin practice for winter season

ST. REGIS – Last week the Lady Tigers of St. Regis began training sessions for the new basketball season.

The Lady Tigers have 11 players this year. According to Head Coach Tyler Hurley, the team had many players came back from last year. However, the team is a young one with only one senior and 10 underclassmen. Hurley said only one player was completely new to the game.

Hurley described the training sessions as intense. For the first hour of a session, the girls work to build up the skills of the game, the second hour the girls learn new offensive strategies. With this as his first year to coach the team himself, he said the girls have had to adapt to his system of teaching. However, there does not seem to have been much difficulty.

“The girls are picking it up pretty quickly, so I’m happy with that,” Hurley said. “We have two weeks to our first game, so we’re going to continue [working on offense].”

It was estimated all but one of the basketball team’s members were veterans of the St. Regis volleyball team. Hurley said the girls got great experience from going to the divisional tournament.

He hopes this experience will help with the drive for winter sports.

“We’re hoping it’ll carry some over for basketball,” Hurley said.

The Lady Tigers are all hard workers and strong players. Because the girls have had to learn a new coaching style, the hardest thing will be teaching the girls his offensive plays.

“Once they get further in the season and understand the nuances of the offense, things will be a little different,” said Hurley. “That takes time for any program to do, especially when it’s a new one.”

While the girls have had Hurley as an assistant coach in the past, this is the first year he has acted as head coach. As a result, the team has seen an all-new training regimen.

Hurley has not based his training style on what other coaches have done. So far, he did not have time to review past games to see what other coaches did and was not in a rush to do so.

He felt it was all about the now and working with the present team as opposed to focusing on past teams. This line of thought has been taken to the future games as well.

“Game to game, we’ll just have to see how we stack up against other teams in the district,” Hurley said.

Hurley said he has not thought about how other games will go yet. He has not seen any of the other teams from the conference and cannot guess about the level of competition. He likes the make up of the St. Regis team and looks forward to the upcoming games. However, at the moment, he is mainly concerned with the game against Victor during the Tiger Tail Tournament next week.

The Lady Tiger’s first game will be at the Tiger Tail Tournament on Friday, December 13 and Saturday, December 14.