SO FAR, so good.
Newly-appointed women’s basketball coach Terry Inniss said he was encouraged by what he had seen so far adding that each and every player worked “extremely hard” during his first national trials on Friday night.
Inniss was full of praise for the players despite having just ten women turn out at the University of the West Indies court for the whole court session.
“They came, worked hard and no one complained about anything and this can only auger well for the future,” said the head coach. “And we were running up and down, doing exercises and mainly running drills trying to instil fast-break tendencies.
“I mean they’re not in good shape, but they’re in better shape than I thought they would be because we’re talking about players who haven’t taken the court in almost a year,” he added.
For the most part, the players ran two-on-one, three-on-two and other full court drills before topping off the sessions with some speed work and exercises.
“As I said before we’re not going back to doing things like they were in the past, but we’ll be looking to go more up-tempo and focus on our fitness,” Inniss said.
“There’s no more walking it up the floor or walking back on defence. Even when we’re coming to timeouts we’ll be running to the sidelines.”
The team, which hasn’t toured since 2007, is slated to compete at the Caribbean Basketball Confederation Championships in Tortola from July 6 to 12.
Barbados, who are expected to be without the services of frontcourt veterans Jamila Studer, Wanda Agard-Belgrave and Astrid Alleyne, have been drawn in a very tough Group “A” alongside United States Virgin Islands, Dominican Republic and The Bahamas. (JM)
