Lady Pirates prep for conference schedule

The Lady Pirates (0-6) started to show signs of improvement in their non-conference 64-50 loss to Ronan on Dec. 20.

“I thought offensively our girls ran their offense pretty well and had a lot of good things that they did well,” Quinn said. “They were patient and that allowed the offense to progress pretty well.”

The Lady Pirates are developing a nucleus with Kealyn Smith, Mollie Fisher, and Lauren Lefthand, according to Quinn.

“Kaelyn Smith is shooting the ball pretty well, Mollie Fisher shot the ball well inside, and Lauren Lefthand really pushes the ball up the court,” Quinn said.

One area that Quinn said he wants the Lady Pirates to focus on is “defense.”

“As far as defense goes, we gave up too many second chance shots and we’ve been working on rebounding and trying to box out,” Quinn said. “We just have to be patient with our offense, shoot up the fast shot and get back on defense so we can get back into our 1-3-1 defense.”

Quinn said the Lady Pirates’ early-season struggles can be attributed to his team’s tough first half schedule.

“We had a lot of scrimmages going up and down the court and hopefully our non-conference schedule didn’t beat us up too bad to the point where we lost confidence in each other,” Quinn said. “It’s a tough schedule and there are a lot of good teams. Sometimes, when you play those Double-A teams, they will even press you deep into the game and towards the end of the game. I don’t know if we are actually benefiting from that.”

According to Quinn, the second half of the conference schedule will include a lot “tough” conference games in Jan. including, Columbia Falls, Frenchtown, and Whitefish.

“The caliber of girls’ basketball is pretty dang tough in the Class-A,” Quinn said. “Coming into our first game against Stevi will be a battle for us. That is going to be a physical type of scramble, I predict. Hopefully, we will get a win (against Stevi) and start feeling good.”

The other two matchups Quinn said his Lady Pirates will face will be Columbia Falls and Frenchtown.

“Against them, the same thing we need to do (in order to win) is our Achilles heel and that is going to be their strength,” Quinn said. “We are going to have to rebound against a team that is much taller than us. C-Falls is going to run and push the ball, and then they will apply a press and make life difficult.”

Frenchtown has last season’s state leading scorer in Class-AA, Shannon Worster.

“I was really impressed with Frenchtown this year and they were already a good team without Worster,” Quinn said. “Hopefully, we will have some success, play hard, improve to get to the divisional tournament,t and we will be able to punch our ticket to state.”