Just a few months removed from reaching the high school basketball mountain top, Starkville’s girls hoops squad has been back in the gym and on the court the last few weeks working to rebuild and carry over their MHSAA Class 7A state championship momentum into the coming season.
It’ll be somewhat of a new look for the Yellow Jackets this year with seven seniors departed due to graduation, including star players Jada Gay, a 6-foot-3 Southern Miss commit and Jade Brown, a 6-foot-3 Omaha commit. Those two helped carry the touch for Starkville during last season’s 31-3 campaign, and now that torch has been passed to some returning talent and some younger faces, who have already been thrown into the heat of battle.
Along with practices, Starkville has already played in many scrimmage games against other talented teams around the state. Last week, the Jackets played against Pontotoc and then played three more games at Jones Community College. The team went to a camp at Mississippi State on Saturday for three more games before seeing more competition at Itawamba Community College on Tuesday.
“We’ve been going out there and putting them in the fire,” head coach Matt Wilbanks said. “We played 11 games and I think outside of Choctaw Central and Philadelphia, every team we’ve played has played for or has won a state championship in their classification.”
And the team isn’t done yet, either. When it is all said and done this summer they will have played around 22 games, Wilbanks said – a perfect way to get those who haven’t seen much action ready for the regular season – a group that the squad will have to rely on this season.
“It’s been interesting,” he said. “We knew kind of going in that for our standards it was going to be kind of a long summer because we have so many kids who are inexperienced that we are now throwing into the fire. That’s what we utilize the summer for.”
New faces, new places
Zariah Brown, point guard Logan Warren and Yasmine Roberts, all rising seniors, highlight the squad as returning starters. Brown, though, recently suffered a broken thumb and will miss the summer action, which Wilbanks said has turned into a blessing in disguise.
“It sucks for her and sucks for us as a group, but it’s probably beneficial because now another guard is getting those reps,” he explained. “It looks a little different because last year we got off the bus and looked like a college team with our size, and this year you’ve got one kid over six foot and you’ve got a couple of guards going into the 10th grade playing good minutes that are 5-foot-2, 5-foot-3. There’s been some growing pains, but you know we’ve also shown a lot of signs of potential and life.”
Some of the new faces to the court for Starkville are Rylee Willis, an rising senior who is “shooting the ball at a pretty high level,” per Wilbanks; Kamare Holmes, who “is a post-body that is having to come in and step up; and three other Jackets going into 10th grade who are all “playing some really big minutes.”
The squad is mostly young and that has reflected on the court through the summer games, where they now stand with a 5-6 record, but that’s OK. The summer is the time for learning and growing, both of which Wilbanks said the Jackets are doing a great job at.
“To be honest we are working on everything,” he said. “We stripped it all the way down because in the summer we don’t have anything really put in offensively. We are just running a basic five-out and letting them roll it out there and hoop. Defensively we try to play a lot of man (to-man coverage), we haven’t gathered the correct concepts the way we want them to do it in high school, so we had to strip it all the way down.
“We just have to keep teaching and growing and letting them become more consistent, because if you don’t have that experience you might look really good for half a game then after halftime they come out there you might be a little lost,” he said. “But we’re excited about that core group coming up. … “(There’s) going to be some bumps in the road and we just keep telling them to trust it and wait until January and we’ll get this thing clicking.”
Growth is what it’s all about for Wilbanks and his staff. They may lose some games this summer during their grind to get better, but that’s what the summer is for. The bar is set high at Starkville for basketball and getting good enough to reach for it begins right now.
“We had a long talk on (Wednesday) and I told them, ‘I’m confident in us as a coaching staff and I’m confident enough in what I see in their potential to be as a group, and I don’t take Jackson off the table,’” Wilbanks recalled. ‘“If you are Starkville the standard is going to be standard and I refuse to let this group be the group that doesn’t live up to that standard. Our name will be in the conversation at the end of the year.’ That’s just kind of the goal we’ve set and we want them to have that mindset.”
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 36 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
