EDWARDSVILLE – The girls’ basketball team at Edwardsville High School is preparing for the 2018-19 season with many losses to graduation, but return two key starters as preseason practice has gotten underway.
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The Tigers, who finished 30-2 with a fourth-place finish in the IHSA Class 4A finals at Bloomington-Normal last season, lost six seniors from their roster, most notably Kate Martin and Rachel Pranger, but return Quirerra Love and Jaylen Townsend. And preseason workouts have been going well.
“It’s going well,” said Tigers head coach Lori Blade in a recent interview. “We return Q and Jaylen, so we’ve got two starters returning, but we’ve got six seniors that we look to step in and really do some good things, and get us going. But so far, practice is going well. It’s going slow, and we’re doing a ton of teaching, but I don’t mind that. That’s the part I love.”
Those seniors include Morgan Hulme, Megan Silvey, and Madelyn Stephen, along with Townsend. Love, a junior, is being touted as one of the St. Louis area’s best players for this coming season, but the Tigers are looking towards a progressive season.
“Well, I think Q will have a good season,” Blade said, “but I think that what we lost with those six seniors, we have a ton to replace, so it’s going to be a progressive season more than it has been the last few years. But we’ll get there. By the end of the year, I hope to be able to compete in the postseason, and hopefully be a team no one wants to see in the postseason.”
The Tiger schedule is a tough one as always. After the first game Tuesday at Granite City, Edwardsville jumps into the O’Fallon Thanksgiving Tournament, where Danville Schlarmann, the defending Illinois Class 1A champ, along with Chatham Glenwood and Normal Community, who are being touted as one of the top teams in Class 4A this season. And also, there’s the Visitation Christmas Tournament in suburban St. Louis, one of the top tournaments in the area every year.
“It’s a tough schedule; it’s not an easy schedule by any means,” Blade said, “especially here at the beginning. We open up with Granite Tuesday, and then we start that O’Fallon tournament, and we’ll see some of the top teams in the state, We’ll see Danville Schlarman, who won 1A last year and didn’t graduate anybody, we’ll see Normal Community, who will probably one of the top five teams at 4A, and then, of course, some Missouri schools, and Chatham and things like that. And then we’ve got the Visitation tournament again, which will be the tops out of Missouri. So our schedule isn’t any too easy for a group that isn’t overly experienced. But like I said, we hope to compete night in and night out, and see how things are going to go.”
And you can expect the Tigers, as always, to take pride in their hard work, and look to improve as the season goes on.
“We’ll get better throughout the year,” Blade said, “and we’ll take pride in what we do like we always do. So, we’ll see how it goes.”
Dan Brannan also contributed to this story.
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