Emporia High squads eager to play after season’s start delayed a week
By Michael Ashford
Thursday, December 7, 2006
For the Emporia High girls and boys basketball teams, the postponement of last week’s season-opening games due to the snow and ice that hit the area carried both positive and negative consequences.
It allowed boys coach Rick Bloomquist and girls coach Bill Nienstedt to continue to hone the skills of their respective teams and it gave a few players on each team some time to recover from nagging injuries.
“We were kind of still out of shape,” senior guard Kyle deBlonk said, “and this extra week has given us more time to get ready and get used to each other and get our team chemistry going.”
But the winter weather also brought about a fair amount of disappointment, as the players on both teams were anxious to begin their seasons, only to see the starting line pushed back a week.
“They were chomping at the bit,” Bloomquist said. “They were like a bunch of thoroughbred horses that had been pulled out of the stable ready to race, and then somebody had to take them back to the stable.”
“We had a bad practice on Friday,” Nienstedt said, “and I think a good portion of it was because of the disappointment of not getting to play.”
Baring some unforeseen blizzard by Old Man Winter, you can bet that little will stop the Spartans and Lady Spartans from taking to the hardwood tonight. The EHS boys will open up play in the first round of the KVOE Paul Terry Classic at 7 p.m. at White Auditorium against Bellvue (Neb.), while the EHS girls will travel to take on Shawnee Mission East starting at 5:30 p.m.
For the boys, their game against Bellvue begins a three-games-in-three-days stretch, as Olathe East awaits on Friday night with a game Saturday to be determined once the first two rounds have been completed.
Bellvue, a team with four starters back off last year’s squad, was picked as one of the top teams in Nebraska in its classification and has already played two games this season to Emporia’s zero. While Bellvue has lost both games, Bloomquist said the fact remained that the Spartans’ opponent has had game experience.
“With them having played two games and us having not played any, that’s going to be beneficial to them a little bit more,” he said. “They can carry their practice over from a game. We haven’t been able to do that yet, so that bothers me.”
So the Spartans head into tonight’s game not fully knowing what to expect from themselves.
“ I want them to play hard. If they play hard, they’ll be focused,” Bloomquist said. “If we can play hard collectively, I think things will fall into place. The shots will come and the rebounds will come because I think these guys play well together.”
For the girls, they face a Shawnee Mission East squad that returns nearly every player from a team that was above .500 last year playing in the always tough Sunflower League.
In an odd twist, last year’s game against Shawnee Mission East was postponed due to snow, though it wasn’t the season opener for EHS. The Lady Spartans would no doubt like to repeat last year’s performance against the Lady Lancers, as Emporia rolled Shawnee Mission East 68-35 in a game played at EHS.
Nienstedt echoed Bloomquists’ sentiments about what he hoped to see from his team to begin the season, saying an increased attention to effort would pay dividends for the Lady Spartans.
“We’ve got to play with great energy and great effort. We’ve got to play with the type of effort and energy that you should have when you’ve waited this long to play,” he said. “I also want to see us do as good a job as possible in execution. Execution is tough early in the season. We need our older kids to lead the way and provide us with a good example of how to execute the things we’ve worked on.”