A new season commences tonight for the Washington girls basketball team when they open the winter with a home bout against Eddyville-Blakesburg-Fremont. 

The Demons seek improvement from a 2020-21 season where they finished 3-19 overall and fifth in the Southeast Conference. They did have a regional semifinal berth after an upset of Oskaloosa in the closing seconds of a first round game. Two of their top three scorers are gone in Anna Nacos and Josie Tanner, but look for the offense to center around junior Alex Murphy. The 5’11’’ center averaged five points and six rebounds in her first full season at the varsity level. Makenna Conrad is back after knocking down 16 threes last winter and Kaylin Long looks to build off of three rebounds a game. Elyse Hunt is the lone senior for a team that has seven underclassmen. Head Coach Shannon Rugg tells KCII Sports his team’s depth will allow them to push the pace a little more this year. “We are going to be an uptempo team and try to get some easy buckets in transition. We haven’t really been able to press and pick up full court in the past because we haven’t had many subs, but this year we can go 10 deep. We have a team that is really athletic and hopefully we can use that to our advantage.”

EBF was 8-14 last year and fourth in the South Central Conference. Whitney Klyn is back after averaging 10.9 of the team’s 47 points a game. The Rockets won the only meeting last year 52-39 that broke a 12 game win streak for the Demons in the series. 

The non-conference action begins at 7:30 p.m. tonight in Washington and listen to all of the action on FM 106.1 KCII, kciiradio.com, or the free KCII Mobile App.