The Sacred Heart Saints may have come away from this past weekend’s exhibition tournament at the YRHS with an 0-3 record, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t any positives.
“We got a lot of compliments from teams that we’ve played in the past. Some of the Regional coaches and even Sam (Twumasi) from Melville and the Swan River coach said we looked pretty good,” said Sacred Heart head coach Garrett Karcha. “I don’t know if we can say that’s good when we still lost the games, but we’ve improved a lot over the year and I was really excited about that.”
One of the areas that the Saints have certainly improved on since the opening tipoff of the season is the offensive side of things – an aspect of the game that Sacred Heart struggled with early on in the season.
As of late, however, the Saints have turned it on, eclipsing the 70-point plateau twice in their past three games, losing 80-71 to Swan Valley and 80-73 to Brandon – Neelin. “We were offensively challenged to start the year, so to come in here and score 70-plus points twice against two of the top Manitoba teams and even putting up nearly 70 points against Estevan earlier, those are positives for us,” offered Karcha. “Going forward I think that’s something that our offence can build off of.”
But with the good comes the bad, as the Saints’ defence – a defence that has been strong all season long, keeping the opposition chances to a minimum - has taken a hit, with the Saints giving up 80 points twice in their past three games; something Karcha knows he has to address should the Saints want to advance past the Regional stage and into the SHSAA 4A Hoopla competition. “I can see that we had some defensive trouble this weekend, so that’s something that we’ll have to work on this week,” mentioned the Saints’ head coach, admitting that the team has been focusing more on offence as of late. “We didn’t even practice defence this last week; we were all about offence, so we need to change gears and take a look at our defence now.”
Karcha believes that if the Saints can buckle down defensively, then they’ll have a good shot this coming weekend at Regionals of pulling off a few upsets and possibly advancing to Hoopla due to the fact that they’re hitting their stride at the perfect time of the season. “Going forward I feel very confident with our chances in the playoffs,” said Karcha, continuing, “We might surprise some teams, because we’re playing our best basketball right now and we’re a different team than we were earlier in the year when they saw us last, so we can surprise them and some teams that haven’t seen us before if we’re slotted against a Saskatoon or a Regina team.”
The Sacred Heart Saints open their 2015/16 SHSAA 4A Regional competition up this Friday as they take on the Saskatoon – Bedford Road Redhawks at 6:00p.m. in Moose Jaw at Central High School.
