Lucas Punkari
The practices and the first exhibition tournaments are in the books.
Now it’s time for the real games to begin for the four Muskie court teams.
The senior and junior girls’ basketball teams, along with the senior and junior boys’ volleyball squads, will be making the trek to Dryden tomorrow for their first matches of the NorWOSSA campaign.
Then they’ll take to their home court next Tuesday afternoon when they host Kenora.
“It’s very exciting to get the season going once again,” enthused junior boys’ coach John Gibson.
“Just in talking to [senior boys’ coach] Alison [Hyatt] about how they did in their tournament this past weekend gets me fired up,” he noted.
“And knowing that we have our first tournament coming up this weekend, along with our league game in Dryden, is very exciting.”
The senior boys opened their season with a tournament in Kenora over the weekend, where they came away with a third-place finish—capped off by defeating the perennial powerhouse Dryden Eagles in the bronze-medal game.
“The guys all played very strong, and going into the tournament I honestly didn’t think we would finish that high,” Hyatt admitted.
“For me, I would say the biggest thing that I took away from the weekend was just how the guys all came together as a team,” she added.
“And I was pleased with the passing, as well, which, in turn, meant that we had a strong, powerful offence.
“We beat a couple of very strong teams, including Dryden, who we haven’t beaten in a very long time, so I’m very pleased with what I saw this weekend,” Hyatt said.
Although the Muskies beat Dryden in the bronze-medal game, Hyatt knows the Eagles will be looking to regain the upper hand when they start the regular season there tomorrow.
“We know that we have to shut down their big hitters as they have a couple of guys that can hurt you,” she stressed.
“So in practice this week, we’ve been working on some strategies in order to do that and we’ve also worked on a few things to get our offence running,” she explained.
As for the junior boys, they’ll be heading to Kenora this weekend following their NorWOSSA-opener tomorrow in Dryden, where the black-and-gold will split their squad in half to take on teams from Kenora, Dryden, and Whitefish Bay.
“We’ll have seven players on each squad so everyone is going to get a lot more court experience, become familiar with the systems that we use, and have a chance to learn and develop by playing a lot of games,” Gibson noted.
“As for league play, it would be great to start off with a win,” he added. “But we have yet to see Dryden play and we still have a few days left here to develop our roster fully.
“Right now, I really have no expectations,” Gibson said. “But if we can just come together and play a nice clean game, I’d be very happy with that.”
The Muskie senior girls’ basketball squad, meanwhile, go into their NorWOSSA-opener tomorrow in Dryden coming off a 2-2 showing at the Lakehead University tournament in Thunder Bay this past weekend, where they were able to beat both Westgate and St. Pat’s.
“Even though we started the tournament 1-1, and we expected the chemistry not to be there right away, we were making way too many fundamental errors,” admitted head coach Dan Bird.
“In our first game, St. Ignatius was way above our level when it came to that and they beat us pretty handily,” he recalled. “So we talked about that following Friday’s games and we played a lot better on Saturday.
“The biggest thing we want to stress to the girls in practice this week is how important fundamentals are, and we just need to execute that on Thursday and in our tournament this weekend in Dryden,” Bird added.
The junior girls also will be back in Dryden this weekend for tournament action.
“Both the tournament and the league-opener will really give us a chance to see how all the girls work together in a game situation,” reasoned head coach Marla Knutsen.
“It’ll also be good to start working on our set plays and things like that as we go along.
“But the big thing [is] to see how they will mesh as a team and how they handle the situations that come about during the course of a game,” she said.
