By TYLER HENRY
Salina Post contributor
Following an 11-10 campaign in 2021-22, the Sacred Heart girl’s basketball team will look to retool and take the next step in the upcoming season
The Lady Knights will once again be led by head coach Carl Hines, who enters his second year at the helm in Salina.
Sacred Heart graduated four seniors over the offseason but still returns a great deal of its core, with seven upperclassmen and a pair of newcomers expected to make big contributions as part of a deep squad.
That rotation will include a trio of seniors in Grace Gormley, Kiera Cochran, and Tessa Junk, four juniors in Katie Weiss, Avery Eshelman, Maegan Torrey, and Sydney Goetz, sophomore Bethany Campa and freshman Skylar Douglas.
Before the 2022-23 season gets underway we had an opportunity to catch up with Coach Hines and get his thoughts on his program ahead of year two.
Q: What were your overall thoughts on the 2021-22 campaign?
A: Last season was our first as a staff and you never really know what you’re jumping into. From year one to year two, we’ve figured out some of the things that we feel we need to change. You need that first year to fully understand the things you want to impact to create more chemistry and continuity that every team needs.
Q: How excited is everyone to get back on the floor and back to playing real games after a long offseason?
A: We’re excited, we lost four seniors but this group is eager, they’re learning and we have a lot more intensity in what we’ve been able to accomplish in practice. We’ll see how it pans out but we’re excited about Friday.
Q: Coming into the year what would you say is the biggest strength of this team?
A: We were awfully young and had to grow up a lot last year. We bring a lot of big pieces from last year back and our mindset has changed. The mentality and maturity are better because a lot of our kids had to go through it as sophomores and that’s helped us improve our dedication and mental toughness.
Q: What are the biggest question marks about this team as we head into the first few weeks?
A: I’d like to see us rebound better than we did last year and shoot it more efficiently. We also want to see what kind of shape we’re in and how deep our mental toughness goes when we feel like we have nothing left in the tank to give.
Q: What are the goals and expectations of this team for this 2022-23 campaign?
A: You want year two to be better than year one, our goal is to build on the tradition of basketball here at Sacred Heart. Every team in the league wants to be the best and that’s a challenge but that’s always a goal. We want to continue to improve each day and we set those individual goals to be better at the end of practice than we were when we came and to remain coachable.
Sacred Heart will open its season in Salina against Clifton-Clyde as the Lady Knights host the Eagles.
For continuing coverage of Sacred Heart basketball, all season long stay tuned to the Salina Post.