After a long layoff due to winter weather, the Washington Demons will finally return to the basketball court this evening when they host conference rival Fairfield for a doubleheader you can hear on KCII. Both Washington teams will look to follow up wins from earlier this season against Fairfield, with the Demons girls winning a close one 43-40 and the boys cruising past the Trojans 79-56.

The Washington girls come into tonight’s contest with a 6-5 overall record and a 3-2 mark in the Southeast Conference. Sophomore point guard Adalyn Long continues to pace the Demon offense by scoring over 12 points per game, while Long and junior Kendall Hinrichsen have been clamping down on opponents by forcing 28 steals each. Head coach Shannon Rugg tells KCII Sports his team is always finding new ways to improve.

“They want to get better,” Rugg says, “so when [the coaches] say, ‘This is something we need to work on,’ they remember that, and we come back and we work on it, and they understand why we’re working on it and just getting better and better and better.”

Washington will try to defeat a Fairfield team that is 2-9 and win their third game in a row in a series that, prior to last season, they had lost 16 straight in.

In the boys’ matchup, Washington comes in having dropped three of their last four overall to fall to 2-3 in conference play and 4-6 overall. While sophomore Drew Conrad and junior Logan McDole have powered a solid offensive attack by each shooting over 40 percent from the field and combining to score over 25 points a game, Demons head coach Collin Stark says his team needs a few more things to go their way on defense if they want to start rolling up the wins.

“The communication, that out-hustling the opposing team,” Stark says, “and trying to do our best [in] the rebounding battle to hopefully win that, [that] is what I think will continue to elevate this team to, hopefully, playing our best by playoff time.”

Washington takes on a Fairfield team that is just 1-10 so far this season. The Demons have won eight of their last nine meetings with the Trojans. You can hear both battles between Washington and Fairfield this evening on 106.1 FM KCII as well as streaming on KCIIradio.com and the KCII app. Coverage begins with the Countdown to Tip-Off at 5:30.