For the first time in the new high school basketball season, the Washington Demons will take their home court tonight, as the Washington girls play their home opener and the Demon boys begin the season with matchups against Albia in a doubleheader you can hear on KCII.
The Washington girls will be looking to bounce back from a 51-37 defeat they suffered last week on the road at Muscatine. Point guard Adalyn Long will be trying to recapture the all-conference form of last season when she led the Demons in scoring, as she was just two-for-13 shooting the basketball last Tuesday.
Meanwhile, fellow sophomore Addison Miller will try to follow up a strong season debut where she had team highs of 12 points and seven rebounds. Washington will be facing an Albia team that lost its opener 56-35 against Sigourney last week and had a record of 9-13 last season. Demons head coach Shannon Rugg tells KCII Sports his team has been ready for this one from the moment the Muscatine game ended.
“They feel like we played a pretty good game,” Rugg says. “They know we made some mistakes, and we’re always going to make mistakes, and so is everyone else. I thought we dealt with that a lot better. Our body language was pretty good for the most part. It’s a group that, over just a couple of weeks, has worked extremely hard, and I’m super proud of them and really looking forward to the next 20 games that we’ve got on our schedule.”
In the second game, Washington will be starting a new era of boys’ hoops. Four starters and six total seniors are gone from last year’s 11-10 team, which came up just short of winning at least a share of a conference championship for a fourth straight season.
The Demons do return junior Logan McDole, who averaged almost nine-and-a-half points, four rebounds and three assists per game last year, but with players like senior Roman Roth, junior Conner Leyden and sophomores Rajan Roth and Drew Conrad stepping into significant varsity roles for the first time, there will be a learning curve. But head coach Collin Stark tells KCII Sports that his players’ love of the game should accelerate that learning process.
“This is just a group that really enjoys playing the game together,” Stark says, “and I think that’s what we’re most excited about this year. Although we’re young [and] we might not have as much size as in years past, we’re extremely quick, we can shoot the basketball, we can share the basketball and, I think, if all of us buy into that message of how we want to play, I think you’re going to see a different team from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.”
Washington is taking on a different batch of Blue Demons from the one that pushed them to double overtime in a 76-71 loss in last year’s season opener. You can hear both games as the Demons duel with Albia this evening on 106.1 FM KCII and streaming on KCIIradio.com and the KCII app. Coverage from the Demon Den begins with the Countdown to Tip-Off at 5:30.