By TYLER HENRY
Salina Post contributor
On the heels of a fantastic 20-4 campaign in which they punched a ticket to the 3A state tournament, the Southeast of Saline girl’s basketball team will look to reload and run it back for the 2022-23 season.
The Lady Trojans will once again be led by head coach Shauna Smith, who enters her seventh year at the helm for SES.
Southeast graduated three seniors over the offseason but returns a majority of its scoring for the coming campaign, and will have a lot of familiar faces in its starting five.
This season, the Lady Trojans will be looking for big minutes from veterans Reagan Goetz, Avery Caselman, Maddie Harris, Brielle Ptacek, and Lexi Jacobson, as well as a pair of sophomores in Adyson Rohr and Emma Zurfluh.
Ahead of the 2022-23 tip-off, we had a chance to sit down with Coach Smith and get her thoughts on the upcoming season.
Q: What were your overall thoughts on the 2021-22 campaign?
A: We achieved an undefeated league record and made it to the state tournament, those were two big goals of ours. We achieved a lot of our expectations and we wanted to get past that first-round game but I couldn’t have been happier for our kids.
Q: How excited is everyone to get back on the floor and back to playing real games after a long offseason?
A: Everybody is excited, you don’t have too much downtime once the season ends but we have a lot of girls who are super thrilled to get back to work. It’s fun to be around it all and our boys are supposed to be really good this year too, it’s fun to do those things together.
Q: Coming into the year what would you say is the biggest strength of this team?
A: All five of the kids that we’ll put out there can put the ball on the floor and score. Size will be our disadvantage but we proved last year that we can make up for that in other ways. We’re athletic, we’re quick, and we have a lot of basketball knowledge.
Q: What are the biggest question marks about this team as we head into the first few weeks?
A: We’re still finding our new leadership. We’ve always had Karsyn Schlesener and now that presence is gone. We also still have a huge size disadvantage which changes how we have to guard people sometimes but we’ve proven that we can play with size so that doesn’t scare us, we just know we have to work at it.
Q: What are the goals and expectations of this team for this 2022-23 campaign?
A: Our first big goal is to take care of business in our league and beyond that, we really want to get past that first-round game at state. We achieved our goal of making the state tournament last year and these girls have some high expectations for themselves again this year. We know what it takes to get there and we know we have what it takes.
SES will open their season at home on Friday, December 2nd when the Lady Trojans host Hesston in Gypsum.
For continuing coverage of Lady Trojan hoops all season long, stay tuned to the Salina Post.