Team attitude key for Lady Broncos

With a lot of different players fighting for playing time, maintaining a team first attitude will be critical if the Wauneta-Palisade girls’ basketball team will have a good year.
WP returns four starters from last season’s 11-15 “learning season”—Zoey Boos, Cali Cox, Haylee Sandman and Alexa Sandman. Payton Yearous and Chloe Stehno also saw quality minutes for the Lady Broncos. The group has played in the last two district volleyball finals and last year made it to district finals in basketball.
Coach Matt Cox said his four seniors, Boos, Yearous, H. Sandman and Kendra Bley, have been great leaders.
No one can rest easy, however.
“We’ve got some very talented underclassmen who will play a considerable amount of varsity minutes,” Coach Cox said.
“There’s situations where that would create some jealousy, but I haven’t sensed it from this group at all. They understand how rare it is to be able to have 10 girls who can play at a high level and the things we can achieve this season because of it,” Coach Cox added.
Having a group like that has also elevated the quality of practices, which he said have been going well.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever had a more experienced team before. It’s one of those rare years where we can get through drills and fundamental work at a pretty good pace, and then go right into a very competitive 5-on-5, and scrimmage for 45 minutes,” he said.
With the substate format, Coach Cox said every game will be important.
“I used to not care a lot about regular season games, they were all practice games for the post season, but that’s not the case anymore. They all matter, those power point rankings at the end of the regular season really dictate the path you have to travel to get state basketball,” he said.
The Cattle Trail Tournament mid-December will be an early season indicator of what kind a of team the Lady Broncos will be, Coach Cox said.  
He added with some early season success adding to WP’s confidence he likes his team’s chances going into the post-season.