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Lady Panthers look back at a successful season

By MICHAEL BOYLAN
mboylan@TheCitizenNews.com

If you look at it on paper, a 9-16 overall record and a 3-9 record in region play doesn’t look like the makings of a successful season. You’d be wrong though because it was a successful season for the Starr’s Mill Lady Panthers, mainly because of the way they played in the region 4-AAAAA tournament.

In the 2004 half of the season, Starr’s Mill went 4-6. They got swept by Stockbridge, fell to Mundy’s Mill, lost to Sandy Creek and lost two games to two fairly talented teams from Alabama and Louisiana in the Light It Up Classic. Their wins were fairly impressive though. They swept Chapel Hill and beat East Coweta and McIntosh. Two of those four wins were by more than 20 points.

The second half of the season featured mostly region games and though Starr’s Mill only picked up three wins before the region tournament started, they showed that they could gut it out with some really good teams, beating Fayette County and Sandy Creek, teams that both made the state tournament, by a point. The region tournament was where the team put it all together. They opened by defeating Lovejoy, a team that had swept them during the season, and followed it with a win over Mundy’s Mill, another team that had swept them. The two wins came by a total of seven points. The team, and all who followed them, began to think that if they stayed close to their opponents, they could keep on winning.

Though they lost the region championship to Fayette County, the Lady Panthers earned the first trip to the state tournament for a basketball team in the school’s history. Not only that, the two wins in the tournament earned them a home game in the first round.

The season came to an end last Friday when the Morrow Lady Mustangs opened up an early lead and won 60-42. The team should not be discouraged though. Not only did they exceed expectations for the 2004-2005 season but the future looks nothing but bright. Though the Lady Panthers will graduate two players from this year’s squad, leading scorer Angela Garza, and one of the team’s top defenders, Aneesha Lane, they will return a number of players hungry to return to the state tournament. Looking back at the season’s stats, it appears that nearly everyone led the team in scoring on at least one night. Katreesa Rollins had good games in the post and Katie Jacobsen lit it up outside the arc on a number of occasions. Emily Woodward helped set the pace on most nights and hit the winning shot against Sandy Creek, while Shannon Dougherty, Kristin Massmann and Meredith Lytle gave consistently solid efforts on both offense and defense.

There is a lot of work to do in the off season and the Lady Panthers can and should get better before the 2005-2006 season, but they should also be applauded for never giving up this year. If that attitude carries over into next season, there’s no telling how far they’ll go.