Winter Preview: Park Hill Girls Basketball

There are only a few contributors left from last year’s 16-11 team that made an appearance in the district title game. Losing seven of their top players to graduation or transfer, the Lady Trojans come into this season with only three players with varying levels of varsity experience. For the most part, Coach Aaron Neeser says his team is young and inexperienced, meaning each game will be an opportunity to learn and improve.

Sophomore Katie Reichert’s three points per game represent the only scoring Park Hill will return. Reichert along with senior Davon Thomas and junior Regina Bolin are the players who have played at the varsity level before. Neeser says while Thomas and fellow seniors Jaeden Cordes and Darion Peterson have done a good job of leading the team so far in practice, they will be just like the rest of the team in looking to overcome their lack of experience.

“They’ve been working hard. They do everything we ask them to do, there’s just not a lot of experience,” Neeser said. “Until we get more experience under our belt, we’re going to have a hard time being competitive.”

Speed is one thing the Trojans hope they can use this season to attack teams on defense with, especially since most of the lineup is made up of guards.

“We don’t have very much height, but we do have some speed so we’re going to try to use that to the best of our ability,” Neeser said. “We’re going to try trapping a little and spread it out, so we can maybe get a few easy layups.”

Park Hill will have a whole host of players in different roles as the season goes on including sophomores Murphy Crowl, Kaylyn Magee, and Jaleiyah Gibbs. As their coach said, we won’t know much about this year’s Lady Trojan squad until their first couple games.

“Until you turn on the lights, you can’t ever be sure what you have or what their potential might be,” Neeser said.

Park Hill starts the season off with some key early season matchups with North Kansas City (Dec. 6^th), Platte County (Dec. 10^th), and Kearney (Dec. 13^th).