Valley Looking To Fill Gaps But Could Surprise Some
AKRON — With all-everything player Sophie Bussard now at Southeast Missouri State, there are some noticeable vacancies for this year’s Tippecanoe Valley girls basketball team. The Lady Vikings will need to find a way to make up for some 21.3 points and 8.4 rebounds a night as well as Bussard’s competitive drive and floor generalship, but this year’s squad does boast a ton of returning talent to fill those voids.
Three returning starters are back with the team from last year’s 16-7 campaign in senior guards Jillian Walls and Emma Craig, as well as senior post Karina Young, who was often the first or second player off the bench for the Vikings last season. Junior guard Sydney Wagner also returns to the team, as does sometime-starter and junior post Hayley Backus. It’s a good combination, and while no single player can make up for the gaps left by Bussard’s graduation, head coach Chris Kindig thinks that if each of his players steps up just a bit, Valley should be pretty competitive this season.
“With Sophie Bussard we lost 20 points a game and basically 10 rebounds a game. Those three seniors need to do a little bit more, along with the two returning juniors. I think if we can get the combination of everybody just doing a little bit more, I think we’ll do just fine,” he said.
Wagner (7.4 ppg, 2.7 assts, 2.8 stls), Craig (6.7 ppg, 2.6 assts, 2.7 stls) and Walls (6.9 ppg) have all shown significant improvement over the offseason, and all have developed their outside shot. Backus (5.7 ppg, 4.7 rbs) and Young give the team a pair of legitimate post presences, and freshmen Kaydence Mellott and Corrina Styles bring promising talent to the roster. Junior Ashley Butler will split time between varsity and JV, and sophomore Mercedes Snapp adds to the mix, too.
If Valley doesn’t have a bona fide DI prospect to replace Bussard this season, it does have a balanced cast, which Kindig says could be an asset to the team.
“I think last year we had five or six players that all averaged between seven and 10 points a game. So I think all of those players are capable of moving up and giving us double figures,” he said. “I think one of our strengths you’re going to see is we’re going to have a lot more balance this year. Those girls aren’t going to rely on Sophie for all the scoring this year, so they know that they each need to do their own thing every night, and I think if we can get that balance, I think we can be pretty good. We’ve got five or six girls that are capable of averaging double figures, and we’ve got some decent rebounding size in there. I think one of our strengths this year is you’re not going to know who to guard from night to night.”
Perhaps more than Bussard’s offensive stats, the Vikings are going to need find a way to make up for her skills as the team’s defensive stopper. There’s plenty of hard-nosed athleticism in this year’s group, but Valley may need to take a slightly different approach on the defensive end of the floor as Kindig evaluates which styles work best with which particular lineup. In-game adjustments are going to be crucial, especially in the early going.
“Not only did you lose 20 points a game and 10 rebounds, but you probably lost our best defensive player — someone that you can put on somebody and shut them down from night to night. It’s one of those things where we are going to mix things up, but I think it’s probably going to be difficult to play man unless we have four guards on the floor,” he said.
“Some nights we’re going to mix it up. I’m not sure right now we can press. I like to press, but I’m not sure if we can do it with our two bigs in there. It just depends on the opponent and the foul situation and where we’re at in the game. I think we’re going to have to be very, very good this year at making adjustments as the game goes on and putting something out there that works and not just sticking with one defense or one offense or whatever.”
And defense is foremost on Kindig’s mind this year.
After watching the team’s defensive average go up a tick or two from seasons past, the 10th-year skipper is hoping to bring it back down to the sub-40s range this year. It’s not that he isn’t confident in his players’ ability to score the ball — he is — but he doesn’t know if there’s quite enough firepower to consistently win shootouts with opponents this season.
“For us, I look at years past, and where we’ve been at defensively and what our defensive average is — what are we giving up per game? I think it went up a little bit last year compared to years when we were making nice tournament runs. We need to get back to that,” Kindig said. “I don’t think we’re going to beat teams in shootouts. I think we’re going to be solid offensively, but we need to be solid defensively, too. If you see early in the year, our defensive average is running in that low 40s or high 40s average range, I think we’re going to have some issues.”
The Lady Vikings would love nothing better than to return to some of the deep postseason runs the program was making between 2014 and 2017. They’re also hoping to return to the Three Rivers Conference dominance they showed in those years, but it’s going to be a challenge against a balanced conference led by Class A, No. 10 North Miami, a veteran Northfield squad and a Rochester team with size and length to spare.
This year’s team certainly has the skills and talent to meet those goals, but they’re going to have to bring the intensity night-in and night-out, says Kindig. Hopefully a front end loaded with home games can relax the Vikings enough at the start of the season as they gets their legs under them ahead of the meat of the TRC schedule in December.
“Our A game is capable of winning us a lot of games this year, but our B and C game will not — especially with some of the competition we have in conference and some of the other teams that we play,” he said. “One advantage we do have this year is I think out of our first seven games, including our tournament, we play six home games. I think from that standpoint for us with developing and seeing where we are with our identity, I think it’s going to help us to play some early home games and get some things established.”