By Jeremy McDonald

jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com

SILVERTON, Ore.–  The Silverton Girls Basketball team brings back a lot of returners from last year’s 5A State Bound team.  A benefit for them as they enter the first-year of the Alyssa Ogle=era.

Ogle has been open that the momentum that Tal Wold had wasn’t going to stop or change under her as she used the Summer to get acclimated to her new role as Varsity Head Coach.

“We’re not trying to fix a broken system, we’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing and building off that.  Keep working on the things that we need to get better at and things we want to adopt as part of our identity  this year,” Ogle said.  “The Summer was huge, but it’s not like being in the gym now that we’re excited.  It’s November-time.”

Familiar faces like Justina Semerikov, Lily Hayashida, Kalyssa Efimov, Kyleigh Brown and Kirsten Kuenzi return from the squad’s 21-6 team that went 14-2 in Mid-Willamette Conference last season.  For Kuenzi, it wasn’t the ending that they had hoped for, but was excited about what is to come this year.

Their defense is strong, the ability to shoot the three-pointer helped them last year, it’s just a matter of polishing off the rest of the offense as they kick off the season in a few weeks.

“We’re coming back with the same strengths that we had last year and this just kind of gives us motivation of ‘look how far we got last year and let’s do that again this year’ and just build off of that.” Kuenzi said.  “Last year we didn’t have a lot of height, but we just found ways to make that work.  How we just work as a defensive body together as a team.  I felt like last year our team was a three-point shooting team, so when those three’s weren’t falling in, we didn’t have a ton of experience of trying to find other ways to score.

“So this year I think we’re going to work on that, inside the three-point line and just trying to figure out ways to score as well as the three-point shooting.”

But the squad will have some time as their first game isn’t until December 2 when they head to Beaverton to play Jesuit before hosting West Salem for their home opener on December 6.

Photos By Jeremy McDonald