The Washburn Ichabod women’s basketball team is approaching their upcoming season. Their team consists of seven returners and five incoming players led by head coach Lora Westling. As preseason training has come to an end, returners and newcomers are ready for their upcoming season.
Amaya Davison, sophomore guard, averaged 14.8 minutes per game, 3.0 points per game, and 1.1rebound per game last season.
“I’d say I’m definitely looking forward to stacking wins and winning some games. Last year we were inconsistent but we have been at work since August so I’m excited to see where our work has taken us,” Davison said.
Despite the inconsistency from last year, the team is excited to improve from last season. Lakyn Schieferecke, senior marketing major and guard,has been around for the coach and culture change of the Lady Ichabods.
“Last year was Coach Westling’s first year and so last year was a big change for us as a team. We had to learn basically entire new offense and defense standards and now we can stay consistent throughout this year and what we’ve learned last year, and really we focus on imposing our will and just playing to a high standard and keeping ourselves at a really high standard,” Schieferecke said.
Schieferecke is also excited to see where all their hard work since August will take them.
“What I’m most excited for is that we’ve been competing against each other since August and now we get to work together and turn that into competing against other people. Really just seeing what we’ve been working on throughout this preseason and the beginning of the season, and turning it into game-like situations I’m really excited to see what we can do,” Schieferecke said.
Westling is entering her second year for the women’s basketball team. Westling shares her thoughts on this year’s team and the upcoming season.
“We have a great group of young women who really want to play hard, they want to play for each other [and] are really connected in that way,” Westling said. “So just trying to get all of our systems in, our standard set, culture set, and ready to go for this first week of competition.”
As they are not entirely sure what the 23-24 season will hold, Westling is focused on achieving their goals and keeping the team busy on and off the court.
“That’s as big as our goals are right now, trying to have a great practice, stack a great practice onto the next day and see if we can continue that mindset,” Westling said. “We’ve definitely kept our student athletes busy. We’ve been really excited about a lot of the community service projects we’ve been doing,”
Every team has their own set of strengths, Westling spoke about what she felt some of those were for this year’s team.
“I think their attention to detail, how they want to compete is really, really strong. As we continue to work we got to work on our consistency and just a couple of skill sets and fundamental things, other than that I just really like the grit of this group,” Westling said.
Washburn Women’s basketball will begin their season on Nov. 21 against William Jewell College in the Lee Arena.
Edited by Sydney Peterson and Jayme Thompson
