Fresh faces add depth to Lady Tigers

The St. Regis Lady Tiger basketball team began summer practices last week with larger numbers than the squad has seen in recent history.

With the increase in numbers, Head Coach Damian Droessler is hoping to schedule more summer league games. In the past, the number of games the team could play in the summer has been limited because of the numbers – if one or two players couldn’t make a game the Tigers couldn’t field a team.

“No real expectations (for summer league games), we are just trying to get a lot of basketball in,” Coach Droessler said. “We have young kids that are going to be fresh next year that we have to have play because of numbers. We need to get them as much play time as possible and it’s great competition. Win lose or draw we will get some positives out of it.”

With the increase in new faces, Coach Droessler said his expectations for the one incoming senior and three incoming juniors are high.

“They have to bring the young kids along quickly because I want to be able to play more than five people,” Coach Droessler said. “I want to make sure they are pushing each other and at the same time helping these other kids along faster than the normal learning curve would require.”

The one incoming senior, Arianna Jones, said she is glad the team gets to have summer league games and that bonding as a team will be one of the most important factors of summer. “It’s exciting more than anything else,” Jones said. “It’s nice to know each other before it actually means something. I think we are going to perform much better than we did last year. We have very high expectations of ourselves.”

With the high expectations Jones and her teammates have for next season comes more intense practices and Coach Droessler said he is stressing one thing above all during practice. “Running. Running. Running,” Coach Droessler said. “We should have a little bit of speed next year. We don’t really have a lot of experience or depth but we should have a lot of speed so we are stressing that as much as we can.”

Over the weekend the Lady Tigers traveled to Darby, where they went 2-3 in a five game tournament, losing two close games to Salmon and one to Hamilton.

“I was very impressed with our girls’ execution of the offense and defense after only playing together for less than one week,” Coach Droessler said. “Arianna Jones stepped up and had a couple real big games, shooting well form beyond the arc. Gabby Moeller was very efficient with the ball inside and anchored our defense.”

Coach Droessler also mentioned the efforts of some of the new Lady Tiger basketball players including Madison Hill who “after getting in to the swing and speed of varsity basketball took control of the offense and put us in great positions.”

“We had a great time and the tournament exposed a lot of things we need to work on, but also, helped us build confidence with big wins over a couple very competitive opponents,” Coach Droessler said.