By TYLER HENRY
Salina Post contributor
After starting their season off right with a 49-36 win over Hesston, the Southeast of Saline girl’s basketball team will return home for a Tuesday tilt with Smoky Valley.
The Lady Vikings exploded out of the gates last week in a 73-39 dismantling of Abilene and will be posed to give the #9 team in Class 3A a real test this evening.
As they did a season ago, Southeast shared the wealth in their season opener, with Brielle Ptacek, Lexi Jacobson, Maddie Harris, Abigail Pearson, and Reagan Goetz all tallying between 8-10 points.
“They did a really good job of spreading the scoring against Hesston and everyone was looking to score,” SES head coach Shauna Smith said. “I also thought our help-side defense was pretty darn good.”
To take things up a notch against a solid Smoky Valley team, the Lady Trojans will need to continue working together on defense where they turned the Swathers over 17 times on Friday.
“We’d still like to get to the rim a little bit more and we had some defensive miscommunication on Friday,” Smith said. “Those are easy things that we’ll look to clean up from game one to two.”
SES will look to get the better of their foes from down the road for the first time since 2020, after falling to the Vikings in their last two meetings.
This year’s matchup may not feature as much play through the paint as it has in years past, with two smaller, quicker lineups set to take the floor on Tuesday.
“Smoky Valley is guard-heavy just like us,” she said. “They’re going to try to push the ball and put on a lot of ball pressure full-court. They really mimic us a lot so we have to get out and make them earn their points.”
With each team looking to pressure the other and find buckets in transition, winning the turnover game will be critical for a pesky Southeast defense, that frustrated opponents all of last year.
“We have to keep everybody in front of us and not always rely on our help defense and we have to score,” Smith said. “We need to shoot the ball pretty well against a team like Smoky Valley and we think they’re turnover prone so we need to keep the pressure on.”
This game will be the latest in a pre-Christmas gauntlet that will include a pair of league opponents in Beloit and Sacred Heart, hungry to wrestle back control of the NCAA after years of Lady Trojan dominance.
“I like having the tougher schedule early in the season,” she said. “Our league is going to be up this year and we don’t have any easy games on our schedule but this prepares us for what we have this season and for things like the Sterling Tournament in January.”
Tip-off between the Lady Trojans and Vikings is set for 6 pm at Southeast of Saline high school with the boy's game to follow at 7:30.
As always the game can be heard on KINA (910 AM or 107.5 FM) or streamed live with audio and video on the Salina Post.