The Blaine Girls Basketball team is on their way to a brand new season this year starting November 30th.

 Excited for the season is varsity head coach Michael Engelhaupt, “I’m excited to work with a group of girls who work hard, have good character, and are generally fun to be around in the gym. We don’t’ have a lot of experience coming back, so I’m excited to coach these girls as they gain experience at the varsity level, and see how much they improve.” said Engelhaupt.

“[Last season] we were 6-21 overall. We Lost to Forest Lake in the first round of the playoffs. We improved a lot. One example, we lost to Centennial, who was a top 15 team in the state, the first time we played them by 47. The second time we played them we won by 4. So that was a sign of some pretty amazing improvement. We definitely were better than our record by the end of the year.”said Engelhaupt.

This year there are a lot of seniors on the basketball team and Coach Engelhaupt has a lot of hope for the seniors in the future. “Playing on a sports team requires dedication and sacrifice. I hope they end the year glad they made the decision to dedicate so much time their senior year to being a part of this thing. And then beyond this year I hope they go on to do great things, and that maybe some of the basketball lessons they learn transcend to what they do in their lives.” Said Engelhaupt.
Both Coach Engelhaupt and manager Josh Lamkin (12) hope the girls accomplish a lot this year. “[I’m] excited to watch the team go to state and this year will be great.” Said Lamkin. “I just hope it’s a fun experience for them. That they learn some life lessons about team work and effort. At the end it’s been a rewarding experience. So the accomplishment would be that the players can say they gave their all and that the sacrifices they made were worth it.” said Engelhaupt.

There are a lot of predictions for this year’s season, “We’ll probably start off slow as girls need to learn the system, get used to playing varsity, and how to play with each other. But who knows where we’ll go from there, we’ve got a lot of potential if the players buy in and work hard,” said Engelhaupt.

“People will step up to fill the rolls of the seniors from last year and break expectations of a lot of people”, said Lamkin.