“We felt real good about what we saw,” said Spring Garden coach Ricky Austin. “It seems like we’ve made a lot of progress since (last summer).”
That’s saying a lot about a team that reached the Alabama High School Athletic Association’s Final 48 last year and returns all five starters.
“We had some good senior leadership show up and that’s what you look for in the summertime,” Austin said, adding that his players were “focused every day. They took all the games really seriously.”
Spring Garden’s seniors, each a returning starter, are Tara Mullinax, Kelsey Turner and Katie Rickman. Also returning from starting roles are Jordan Sides and Heather Smart.
“We had some freshmen come in and log a lot of minutes and they produced. We’re a lot deeper than we were last year,” Austin noted.
Austin said the Panthers typically played 10 deep and “played at a high level with all ten.”
The second group of five included Lynley Crabb, Tori Pierce, Callie Thompson, Auburn Kirk and Haley Motes. Motes and Kirk will be freshmen in the fall. Also on the 14-player varsity roster are sophomore Sarah Barnes and freshmen Darby Bryant, Kaylee Cronan and Dallas Smith.
Austin experimented with a lineup that had Kirk at point guard and Sides at shooting guard and called the experiment a success. Motes showed she could shoot effectively in game situations and Pierce “brought a lot” when she moved to Mullinax’s position on the inside.
“We didn’t run a lot of offensive sets, we just played basketball,” Austin said. “They were able to play basketball without being so robotic for a coach calling plays.”
Defense was a constant theme as Austin stressed pressure defense and full court defense.
“We started every game with full court defense, playing a pace we like to play,” he said.
As the play-date games continued, players came to Austin and asked for knee pads.
“If they’re needing knee pads again, that’s a good sign for us,” Austin said. “I really liked the effort.”
Austin described the Panthers’ game against St. Jude of Montgomery, which returns to Class 1A for the next two years, as “the best game of the summer.”
Despite facing a pair of 6-footers for the Pirates, Spring Garden rallied to force overtime then won the game when Rickman netted a 3-point basket in the final 20 seconds.
The competition at Shorter, three games each day, came almost exclusively from much larger schools. Austin said Spring Garden faced a real challenge against Rome, the Georgia equivalent of a Class 6A program in Alabama.
“They pressed us just as hard as we pressed them and we were able to handle it,” Austin said.
The Panther girls get a few days off then return to summer workouts on July 1.
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