(Greenfield) The Nodaway Valley girls basketball team rides a four game win streak heading into their matchup with East Union on Thursday. We’ll have the contest on KSOM with pregame at 5:45.
Nodaway Valley is 9-3 overall. Head coach Brian Eisbach points to effort as one of the key factors. “We play hard. That’s something we kind of focused on during break. You don’t have to play perfect, you are going to make mistakes, but play hard. Keep going as hard as you can as long as you are in. The kids have really responded well. We’ve forced jump balls, we haven’t just stood there and watch. So far we’ve been able to build some momentum.”
Coach Eisbach says it has been a total team effort creating havoc on defense. This team returned their two top scorers from last year’s state tournament team, but not much beyond that. They’ve been steadily getting better throughout the season. “I feel like we are trending in the right direction. You don’t want to be playing your best basketball in January, but you do want to show improvement as time goes on. Christmas Break was good, we were able to give the kids a break, but yet when we started back up we ramped up the conditioning and tried to get up a lot of shots and put in some new actions. We are trying to get better one day at a time and the East Union game will be our next game. Obviously Panorama is looming. Everybody in Adair County and across the state knows they are #4. We don’t want to look past anybody, but I think the kids are getting excited or looking forward to the opportunity to play one of the best.”
Nodaway Valley was a 73-18 winner over Clarke in their last game on Monday night “We were executing our press pretty strong. We had really good rotations. Our help side defense in half court and full court has gotten much better. A lot of that comes from the kids communicating better. We’ve worked hard on identifying shooters and making sure every shot is contested. I felt like our varsity did a really good job of that against Clarke.”
Maddax DeVault is averaging 21.5 points and 5.2 steals per game. Lindsey Davis averages 15.5 points and 5.5 steals per contest.
Nodaway Valley coach Brian Eisbach: