Park Hill girls will lean on strong group of seniors

By most accounts, Aaron Neeser’s first year as head coach of the Park Hill girls basketball program was going to be rough. With a young team though, he was able to make more progress in the 2010-11 than expected and led the Lady Trojans to an 11-16 season. Not what he or his players would describe as successful, but one they could use as motivation coming into this 2011-12 campaign to build towards winning basketball.

“A lot of people put the over-under at single-digits last year, but we hit 11 wins. Was it acceptable for me? No, but it was an improvement. So are the expectations high this year? Absolutely,” Neeser said. “There is a lot of enthusiasm.”

With the return of several key parts to last year’s team, Park Hill will be returning a cohesive group of six seniors including leading point scorer and future Colorado Buffalo Kyleesha Weston, guards Shelby Blanchard and Beth Sullinger, and forwards KK Rettinger, Sarah Sumpter, and Amanda Lawrence. In the mix with this groups of seniors will be returning starter and 6’ 0” center Dominique Broadus along with Davon Thomas and Regina Bolin.

“I would say our strength is chemistry and people knowing their roles,” Neeser said.

Park Hill hopes their experienced group will come with a more aggressive nature resulting in a faster playing pace and more scoring opportunities.

“We’re going to try to push the ball because we have some depth and try to get a lot of shots up. We’re going to press when we can in our man defense, but we’ve also got a couple wrinkles we can use,” Neeser said.

Overall, Neeser and the Lady Trojans are looking forward to the season ahead and will look to two key early season matchups against North Kansas City and Park Hill South to gauge how far they’ve come since last season and in the opening weeks of practice.

“I’m excited to see all the work we put in the offseason, but we know we’re not a finished product and will improve throughout the year,” Neeser said.