Girls basketball embarks on season down large amount of experience

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Greg Woods

Senior Madison Mittie looks to pass in a game last season in Manhattan.

Greg Woods, Online Editor-in-Chief

By nature, high school basketball teams lose players to graduation. That much is to be expected.

Losing six, however, goes far beyond what most teams endure.

But that is what the Manhattan High girls basketball faces heading into its 2015-16 campaign.

Head coach Scott Mall, who enters his 23rd year at the reigns of the program, said the loss is largely unprecedented.

“It’s been awhile. We’ve had big groups before, but it seems like it’s been awhile since we had a group this big,” Mall said. “Losing six seniors, all of whom were key players, is quite a bit to lose.”

Instead, the team looks to its smaller group of three seniors in Tarrah Bammes, Maddie Mittie and Mackenzie Gwinner this year, as well as two juniors in Gigi McAtee and Kennedy Wilson, to lead the squad that advanced to its second-straight State tournament last year.

Mall said he expects the scoring to come from a variety those players, as well as others.

“For Gigi and Madison Mittie, there’ll be more scoring opportunities, I think, for them this year, because we have less experience out there,” he said. “Hopefully those two can kind of lead the way there. And then I think our other girls are all capable of chipping in and doing some things. I could see us having different high scorers at different times. We have a lot of girls with different abilities; it just kind of depends on what the other team is like.”

On the short list of returning experience sits Wilson, one of Mall’s first options off the bench last season. Mall said he expects the junior to continue to eat up minutes for the Lady Indians.

“I’d expect her to step up. She’s our most experienced inside presence,” Mall said. “She’s worked really hard; come a long ways from when she was a freshman, so I’d expect good things out of her.”

Over the summer, the team attended camps Wichita State and Kansas State held. Mall said the experiences will pay off on the court.

“Those kinds of experiences are always big for building [chemistry],” Mall said. “Especially this year, graduating so much experience…. It really gave them a chance to integrate together and see how their games fit together.”

Bammes agreed, saying the camps offered a chance to see what each other brought to the table.

“It showed us how everyone played, and their different styles, and actually coming together and seeing how each other worked,” Bammes said. “We made good passes out for threes; we made good passes in for the post. I think if we continue that same teamwork together, then we should be really good this year.”

Apart from the three seniors and two juniors that return to this year’s roster, Mall expects juniors Chelsey Henry and Aubrey Downie, sophomore Josie Hilgers and even freshman Kia Wilson to compete for playing time. He said all are viable options.

“We have some young girls,” Mall said. “We have some sophomores and even some freshmen that I think are capable of getting some Varsity minutes.”

The Lady Indians kick off their season at the Hays Shootout tournament, where their first opponent lies in Thomas More Prep-Marian. Mall said there are both positives and negatives to beginning a season away from home.

“There’s good and bad,” he said. “It’s tough to start off in a tournament atmosphere, especially this year like this, where we have a lot of new pieces to put together. But it’s also nice to start off together like that. They stay together a couple of nights, so they get more used to one another. We do get to fit in some practice time after the first game, which is huge.”

Manhattan tips off against TMP Thursday, Dec. 3.