As the winter break is quickly approaching, so are winter sports. Basketball, one of the most popular sports in this school, is one of those returning sports, which means the Girls JV team is also coming back to FHC. On Tuesday, December 9th, the Girls will tip off their season opener at Caledonia.
The Rangers will have 5 games, against Caledonia, Thornapple Kellogg, Zeeland East, Reeths-Puffer, and Zeeland West, until their break for the winter holidays. The Girls will look to start those 5 games off strong against tough opponents, but player Marley Marko and the team have goals entering this season.
“We want to grow together as a team,” Marko said. “We really want to win games as a team, too.”
It’s been a rough few years for Girls Basketball at FHC, with Varsity going 7-15 last season, and 7-16 the season before that. These Sophomores on JV hope to really develop and be ready for next year, and end the deep plateau the Varsity team has been stuck at for the last 2 seasons. Coach Brown has goals of her own for these girls to develop for next year.
“My goals are for the team to compete at a high level every day and to make ourselves and each other better,” Coach Brown said. “We also want to lead our conference in our record, be an example for the next generations of Ranger basketball players, and most importantly, we want to have fun.”
They first plan to do their best this season after a long offseason since last winter as freshmen. They hope to have some high-quality practices before the tip-off on December 9th, as the frequency of games in Basketball really limits how hard they can compete at practices during the season. This team has been working extremely hard at practices for a while, as the players plan to all grow from the skills they showed off last year on the freshman team.
“Team practices have been great! We’ve been having so much fun, paired with being serious and preparing for games,” Marko states. “We had preseason scrimmages on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving that went really well.”
The Girls will come back from winter break, hopefully refreshed to host the East Grand Rapids Pioneers, one of FHC’s main rivals in many sports. East Grand Rapids is known to have strong basketball teams, both Boys and Girls, so the Rangers will look to start off the second semester strong against some tough opponents, including the Grand Rapids Christian Eagles, Forest Hills Eastern Hawks, and Forest Hills Northern Huskies.
Coach Brown also believes that these final practices before season tip-off are extremely important to start off strong.
“Our practices have been going well; we now have two freshmen joining the team, which is great for our roster size, so we can get up and down more frequently in our practices,” Coach Brown said. “Our practices are high intensity, and we are learning a lot as a team as we progress towards our first week of games.”
The team, composed entirely of Sophomores, has some strengths that they have had together since last year as the freshman team.
“Our team’s biggest strength is our team chemistry. This team is made up of a lot of the same people who played together in our middle school team,” Marko said. “So we have all been playing together for a long time, and now with all the sophomores being on the JV team, we have had a lot of good relationships and time to bond over the years.”
Coach Brown also believes this team has many strengths from watching practices before this season’s start.
“The camaraderie between the girls on the team, the leadership from the sophomore class, and the desire to compete and grow as a team every day are this team’s biggest strengths,” Coach Brown said.
The good part of moving up from freshman to a JV team is the fact that you may recognize opponents’ play style from last year. Playing Similar schools gives them an advantage as they can try to target some weaknesses their team had last year, and also plan to lock up their strengths. The Rangers will also play some teams multiple times this season, such as East Grand Rapids, Forest Hills Northern, Eastern, and Ottawa Hills, which will let them learn the other teams’ skill sets as well.
This group of girls will give their full effort to go as far as they can this season, along with the varsity team, looking to turn things around and make the playoffs. This year is these girls’ last chance to develop before entering the big leagues next year on varsity, so they will hope to use it to their full advantage to prepare for becoming varsity athletes next year.
