U14 Girls Win Coastal Classic

A great job by the girls this weekend in a very tough tournament.  Six fully timed games makes it survival of the fittest, and we were.  Today was particularly rewarding with all the girls showing improvement in their understanding of what is required to defeat the top defensive teams.  This morning the bench and our Div 2 fill in players did the bulk of the heavy lifting against a pesky Tamworth team.  This allowed our starters to take a well-earned and invaluable rest for most of the second half of this game.

The way we ground our way back into the Manly semi-final game was simply brilliant.  Manly are a quality team with star players, genuine size and an extremely high level defensive system, so being able to make enough outside shots to beat them at the back end of a tough tournament was extremely satisfying.  You have to make shots from the outside to beat this team and we did, along with making key defensive plays in the last 2 minutes.  Gradually the girls are getting a better and better idea of what it takes to win at this level.  One day I hope some of the girls will be able to display these skills at National Championships when they play for us later this year at the Club Championships and a little later on when they play for NSW.

Lastly, being able to blow out a very good Newcastle team in the Grand Final game was just a tribute to the fitness and mental toughness of the girls, who managed to execute our offence the best that they have so far, at the end of a long and gruelling weekend.  Being able to score 53 pts with some pretty average outside shooting and even worse free throw shooting, shows just how many quality shots we produced and how much pressure we were able to put on their defence. We were able to make several adjustments both defensively and offensively from the first game, with the highlights from both finals games being the extra passes required to get better shots.  Also a tribute to how smart our group is, was our ability to perfectly implement a new “end line” defensive system during the course of the tournament.

All this caps off a perfect start for the Spiders U14 Girls who have now won the Ralph’s Café Tournament and both Divisions 1 and 2 of the Coastal Classic, with our Sydney Flames defeating a very strong Dandenong team in the knock out semi-final of the WNBL in Melbourne being icing on the cake.

See our facebook page for more reports and photographs of Spiders teams at the Coastal Classic (and the Div 2 teams from the previous weekend).




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