For the second straight year, the St. Paul Regional High School girls Saints basketball team are Lakeland Basketball Association champions, following a 44-27 victory over the Cold Lake Royals last Wednesday evening in St. Paul.
“We’ve had our moments. One part of the season we had eight wins in a row then we kind of had a bit of a hiccup. We just finished losing to this team on Saturday in Cold Lake by about 20, so really good resilience shown by the girls to come back and win like that,” said Saints Head Coach Trent Rowley, adding the Saints stepped it up on defence to earn the championship victory.
“We only gave up nine points in the first half, they were pretty dominant on defence for sure, that’s going to win us games.”
Saints player Randi Drummond, who put up 15 points on Wednesday, said that while St. Paul stumbled over the weekend, they bounced back thanks to a strong team effort in the Lakeland championship game.
“We definitely played as a team. We had a lapse on the weekend and that didn’t help us, but we really banded together in these last two practices we had, we pulled together as a team and I think that really helped. We stayed positive, we were encouraging.”
The championship victory earns the local girls basketball team a spot in zone championships in Fort McMurray on March 15, where the Saints hope to lock up a place in provincial championships, which will be played at Holy Rosary in Lloydminster, March 20-22.
“We have a good chance (at zones), we should be seeded pretty high. We should be, I’m thinking in the top four seeds, maybe two-to-four, and we’ll kind of go from there,” said Rowley. “We’ve got one more tournament this weekend in Marwayne (March 1-2), and then we’ve got two weeks of practice before we go. We’ve competed pretty well against most other teams in this zone.”
Drummond added the Saints will need to hold to their game plan as the team looks to zones, stressing the value of teamwork in pursuit of success.
“We need to keep the teamwork up,” she said. “We’ve just got to keep everything going, we’re got to stay at the peak of our game going into zones, we can’t let anything slip.”
