After their eighth straight win, the Seton Catholic girls basketball team is progressing right on schedule.
The Cougars claimed a 36-22 win over Trico League foe King’s Way Christian on Thursday to climb to the top of the league and keep intact a win streak that started on Dec. 19. Sophomores Madison Lee and Riley Seymer led Seton with 13 and 10 points, respectively.
Though the team began the season by losing four of its first six, head coach Joe Potter wasn’t worried. The team is exceptionally young, with nine sophomores on its 12-player varsity roster.
The Cougars needed a little time to get acquainted with each other. Yet Potter expected them to be clicking by mid-January, and he was right.
“Of course, I like where we are,” he said.
Last season was Seton Catholic’s most successful campaign in program history as the Cougars reached the Class 1A state opening round and finished 20-4.
Most of the team’s sophomore class was part of that run and practiced against a stellar class of seniors who led the program.
“I think that gave them the confidence,” Potter said. “I always remind them, if you can stop Anna Mooney, Hannah (Jo Hammerstrom) and Keira (Williams), we’re probably going to be OK. I think they bought into that, and then sometimes, I don’t think they think much about who we’re playing. We focus on one game at a time, and they do a really good job of that. They don’t get too far ahead of themselves.”
Though Thursday’s win was a defensive struggle and ended up being Seton Catholic’s lowest-scoring game of the season, the team got contributions from all over the floor.
The team starts three sophomores in Seymer, Lee and Remy Jenniges alongside senior Alyssa Mancuso and junior Hailey Hammerstrom.
Seymer, a 6-foot-1 post and the team’s leading scorer, returned this season from a broken foot suffered midway through her freshman season. Lee is the team’s primary point guard filling the void left by Mooney, last year’s Trico League Player of the Year who’s now playing basketball at College of Idaho.
Off the bench, the Cougars got contributions from a trio of sophomores in CJ Moore, Tiffany Sheldon and Naomi Jackson, who suffered an injury in the second quarter and did not return.
“I tend to play a lot of players,” Potter said. “I play girls maybe when I shouldn’t at times because they work so hard in practice. You want to keep them engaged and part of it, and they are part of it. A couple times this year we wore people out. We’ll full-court (press) them, a fast-paced game going both ways and we’ll eventually wear them out.”
Seton Catholic didn’t spend much time setting goals for the season, at least not with the coaching staff, and there was a sense of tempering expectations for a rebuilding team.
Yet all of a sudden, the Cougars (10-4, 4-0) stand alone at the top of the Trico League standings and are well-positioned with six games left in the league slate.
“I have in my mind what I think we should be, but let’s just go out and get better every day,” Potter said. “We talk about that — let’s be better tomorrow than we are today, and let’s keep it really, really simple.”
SETON CATHOLIC 36, KING’S WAY CHRISTIAN 22
KING’S WAY CHRISTIAN — Avery Tindol 2, Hannah Erwin 7, Bridget Quinn 8, Ally Smith 0, Alivia Sand 0, Kate Kesler 1, Addison Bagley 4. Totals 6 (3) 7-17 22.
SETON CATHOLIC — Madison Lee 13, CJ Moore 0, Naomi Jackson 0, Remy Jenniges 2, Alyssa Mancuso 7, Tiffany Sheldon 2, Kasey Clifton 2, Hailey Hammerstrom 2, Riley Seymer 10. Totals 13 (6) 4-4 36.
King’s Way 0 6 5 11—22
Seton Catholic 12 4 11 9—36
