Tough tests sharpen Waterloo girls basketball

ATWATER TWP. — A team with dreams of doing big things in February and March doesn’t mind taking a few risks in November and December.

So the Waterloo girls basketball team, fresh off a 20-win season, set up a gauntlet to start its 2022-2023 campaign.

Alliance.

Brookfield.

St. Vincent-St. Mary.

“We did schedule those games for a reason,” Vikings coach Kevin Longanecker said. “We didn't go into them like we thought we would as far as personnel [with an injury to star post Kaira English], but hey, that's life, life deals things, and so yeah, we purposely put ourselves in [a] position where we were going to be challenged and we might lose.”

The Aviators were hypothetically the least daunting of the three opponents, having undergone a number of losing seasons of late. That said, Alliance coach Rod Smith has the Division II program heading in the right direction, led by star scorer Jayla Collock and the return of post X’Zaryia Fannin from Canton McKinley. The Aviators edged the Vikings, 56-50.

Next up was Brookfield, one of the top teams in the bigger-school tier of the Mahoning Valley Athletic Conference, with the Warriors beating the Vikings by 10. And then came St. Vincent-St. Mary, one of the top teams in the region, if not the state, and it handed Waterloo a 60-18 decision.

“Athleticism with Alliance,” Longanecker said of the challenges his team encountered. “Then, Brookfield had some great finesse players, shot the ball extremely well, and they defended well as a group, and then St. V, you got a lot of kids that are going to be playing college basketball at various levels, and so going against that caliber of an athlete, I thought it was a great challenge for us just to see what we could do and you can draw from that.“

For a Vikings team that didn’t lose for three months last season, from their opening loss to the Aviators to their district title game loss to Liberty, three straight defeats was a new experience, but not necessarily a bad one.

Indeed, Waterloo followed that 0-3 start with four straight wins entering Monday’s contest against Sebring McKinley. And when the Vikings’ first home league game, against Western Reserve, proved tricky due to an unusually rough shooting night, they were up for the challenge.

“Coach wanted to give us a great challenge for our first couple games to prepare us for what we're going to see in the league,” Waterloo senior point guard Rose Couts said. “I think losing those first three games made us have the hunger to want to beat other teams in the future and we knew we needed to see good to be good.”

Waterloo stays humble in a season of great expectations

The expectations were always going to be massive along Industry Road this season.

The Vikings returned everyone from last year's 20-win squad, including one of the area’s most dominant posts (Kaira English) and top-scoring guards (Couts). Lilly Foster added a second strong guard (and deadly defender) and Abby Mazur established herself last season as a wicked shooter.

Everyone was back and the team was only going to get deeper.

But Longanecker worked hard, per Couts, to ensure that his team realized that nothing was guaranteed. Just because Waterloo returned its entire roster didn’t mean another league championship was assured. After all, the Vikings had any number of tough 50-50 games go their way last year.

As Longanecker said in the aftermath of Waterloo's challenging MVAC Scarlet Tier opener against Western Reserve, winning is hard.

“I would say every day Coach L helps us and makes us know that it's not going to be easy and every team wants to beat us,” Couts said. “So we're going to have to be better than we were last year.”

If anything, Waterloo’s opening schedule, and falling to three tough teams right out of the gate, was a reminder of just how hard winning is.

“I think it was a good learning experience for us,” English said. “It made us work harder in practice knowing that teams can come out and beat us, so I think it's helped us.”

Not that losing wasn’t frustrating. And of course, even more frustrating than losing was not being able to play at all, as English missed Waterloo’s opener due to an injury she sustained during soccer season.

“It was very frustrating sitting there watching, but it kind of fuels me,” English said. “Like the sooner I get better, the sooner I get out and start."

While the Vikings’ older players got a reminder of how challenging winning is against the Aviators, Irish and Warriors, newcomers like freshman Bayley English learned quickly what it takes to succeed on the varsity level.

“Yeah, it's hard,” English said. “I didn't realize that, but it's scary. It's nerve-wracking.”

Together, through three losses, the Vikings saw what shots do and don’t work against an athletic defense, guarded all sorts of elite players and compiled a season’s worth of teaching moments in three games.

“The kids are looking at that film from time to time, you know, 'What could I have done differently?'” Longanecker said. “I know I am.”

Already, three straight losses have provided lessons that helped lead to four straight wins.

The hope is those lessons learned in late November and early December don’t just lead to wins in December and January.

The hope is they help in February and March as well.

“We come out of that stretch 0-3 and I think that's healthy for us because we played some tremendous talent and got to try to exercise our skill level against some great opponents,” Longanecker said. “I'd do it again in a heartbeat.”

This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: Tough tests sharpen Waterloo girls basketball