DesotoExplorer.com

Girls basketball coach Dwight Spencer is quick to acknowledge that summer basketball provides extenuating circumstances that might make it less than a perfect indicator of how a team will perform the following winter.

Sometimes teams don’t field full squads, girls are absent and injuries happen. But summer ball can reveal a few things, especially when a team takes first-place in the league and second-place in the postseason tournament.

“This summer went really well,” Spencer said. “I was very pleased with the girls’ commitment. They responded well to all the challenges.”

The results of the summer came on the heels of a disappointing winter campaign that saw the Wildcats win just three games. The off-season turnaround, one which saw De Soto take the league title against Frontier League foes Ottawa, Eudora, and Baldwin, has the coaching staff excited for November.

“Our schedule will obviously be tougher next winter,” Spencer said. “But we still did a lot of good things and have better depth than in previous years.”

Spencer said a strong showing from his starting five and some good performances off the bench would allow him to run seven or eight players in his system consistently.

With four starters returning, Spencer said the girls are familiar with the offense and many of the girls have made “Kelsey Fisher is doing a better job of taking care of the basketball, which is something that challenged her in the past and she’s limiting turnovers,” he said. “She’s playing well and making good decisions.”

The coach added that Katie Williams and Shelbi Petty also had strong summer seasons.

“We asked Katie to face the basket more this summer and she did some nice things,” he said. “She really responded well. And Shelbi Petty is a bundle of energy, she just goes and goes and goes. She was taking over games and running teams into the ground with her energy.”

Having Williams face the basket is just one aspect of a new offense that Spencer plans to implement. The new offense, which the girls learned during camp earlier this summer, was not practiced much during summer ball.

“We’re going to try to run it a little more next winter when we have more time,” Spencer said. “It takes a lot more repetitions than what we had this summer.”

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