By Bruce Karnick

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Girls Basketball was one of a few Hastings teams to have new leadership for the 2021-22 winter season. Head Coach Sheri McLeod took over the reins of the Lady Raiders and led them to a 15-11-0 record on the season after only winning five games last season. Several of the loses could have gone the Raiders’ way with how close the games were, given Hastings was learning a new play style.

Hastings created multiple three-game win streaks throughout the season, and many of those were only interrupted by a single loss. Anytime you tell a coach they will win three out of four of their games most of the season they will tell you they would take that. The Raiders started playing their best team basketball the last five games of the season. Of those five games, they only won one. So how was that their best team basketball? Easy, they played really well together. They were taking great open shots and getting at least one, often times two or three offensive rebounds. They just could not seem to make the shots fall.

The good news for Hastings is they only graduate two this year, Maggie Schlottman and Lilly Nuytten. The bad part of that is both seniors played a big role in the Raiders’ successes this season. Their leadership on and off the court will be missed, but that also opens the door for a very capable group of younger players to step into those kinds of roles.

Another piece of good news was the conversation with coach McLeod after the Park loss. McLeod is excited for what the future holds. She talked about how excited she is to have 2-3 more years with the group of players coming up. Her enthusiasm for the future indicated her desire to stay a Raider and to grow the success of the program.

“I do have summer workouts planned for them to come in and shoot. Keegan and Emma both play AAU. There's a couple other girls that are playing AAU as well. So, I don't know their travel schedule. But I'm intentionally setting up workouts all summer so that they can get in there and we can work fundamentals and we can work shooting and we can work anything and everything that needs to be worked on. So, the plan during the offseason is just to get better, better and better and better so that we can show up next time how we ended it. That's how we need to start,” explained McLeod.

Big things are on the horizon for Hastings Girls Basketball and fans should be excited already for next season.

Photo courtesy of Beck Photography/dennyb.zenfolio.com.