Varsity Girls Basketball Coming Together as a Team
By John Earp
The Jal High School Varsity Girls’ Basketball Team is coming together really well this season, according to Head Coach Buddy Little. The team has been focusing on fundamentals in their initial practices. Little says, “There’s not been a lot of consistency in the girls’ program, which is nobody’s fault. I feel good about the team, I feel like our district is going to be real competitive.” The team has unfortunately experienced repeated head coaching changes over the past few years.
Little says he coached girls’ basketball as an assistant in Texico from 1998 to 2003. He says, “We won three state championships and then I sat out a year. I took a principal job there at Texico, and then they asked me to come back and I coached two more years. We went 4812. We didn’t win the state championship the years I was head coach, but we went 4812. We knocked on the door, but we didn’t win the state championship.” Assisting Little this season are Coach Varsity Girls Basketball coming together as a team are Johnny Estrada and Coach Anna Bahena.
Coaching girls’ basketball this season was something unexpected for Little. “Really, what I was doing was I was teaching math and I was enjoying it, and then they had hired Coach Homer to coach girls and then he had a family issue and couldn’t coach. So, then they looked around the district and found [me]. I had coached a long time ago, and they said, ‘Hey, would you please take them?”
Little says the girls are working really hard, and says they “just have to become a team and get better fundamentally, and we’ll be alright when it’s all said and done. We have a real tough schedule up until Christmas. We’re playing the defending 3A state champions, the defending 2A state champions, and the defending 1A state champions, all of them. Between now and Christmas, it’s going to be real tough.”
Their first game will be at home today against Texico, the defending 2A state champs. Little says the team is “going to focus on getting better in all the little things and we’re going to give them everything we’ve got. We’re planning on winning the game, but if we don’t we want to improve so that by the time we get into district, we’re ready to beat everybody in the district.”