Girls' season in review

The 2009-10 basketball season at Columbia High School has been over for the Tide girls for more than a week now.

The Tide girls won’t play their final two games against Pequea Valley and Annville-Cleona and will finish 0-20.

So let’s get the unpleasant stuff out of the way first. This will be first time since I think the early 1980s that Columbia won’t participate in the District 3 playoffs, where they haven’t advanced past the first round since Rick Bentley left as coach since I think it was after the 2000 season. It’s also the first time since the early 1980s or even before that the Tide failed to win a game in girls’ basketball.

Now, let’s move on.

The Tide program has dropped from the top of the L-L League since Bentley left as coach to the bottom. In came new coach/old coach Gary Sutton, who guided the Tide boys to a state championship back in 1987. With his arrival came a whole new way of playing basketball for the girls. There were multiple offenses, defenses and other characteristics that the girls hadn’t seen in years. The entire season, learning a new system was a learning experience on both sides. Despite a youthful roster, the Tide girls played hard every game. They just didn’t have the varsity experience yet,

For me, you saw 12 of their 20 games, there were several bright spots.

The first was the play was senior guard Emily Nobile, who I always felt should have played more varsity before this year, relished in the role of a leader and a point guard. She led the Tide in scoring with an average of around 12 points a game. She was deadly from the foul line and one of the best three-point shooters in the section.

The other thing I saw that I liked. For the most part, the Tide was able to adjust on the fly to a new style. There were moments when it looked ugly, but that can be expected.

There’s a good future here. There are four/five starters coming back and a number of players moving up from the junior high, which had a .500 season that will help with numbers and the re-establishment of the junior varsity team,

The other four/five starters back – juniors Becca Kuhn and Jenna Geesey, sophomore Paige Herchelroath and freshmen Jenna Plastino and Ashlyn Phillips all got a taste of varsity life this year and will be better next season.

I thought going in, the Tide’s schedule was brutal – L-S played for a state title last season (Columbia played them twice), Mennonite just missed out on a state tile appearance ans there was the two Catholics – Lancaster Catholic and Lebanon Catholic. Had to that Hempfield and you got a rough schedule for such a young team.

The schedule next season, other than the league schedule will not nearly be that tough, so winning following a good off-season, will be in order for the Tide.