WAUKEE, Iowa — “Being at home for awhile has made us kind of like work a little bit harder because we feel like we’re a little bit behind,” said Waukee junior, Reagan Bartholomew.
The Waukee girl’s basketball team is back on the floor this week after having to take a two week pause because of Covid concerns.
“It’s kind of like that feeling of the first day of practice but it’s mid-january now,” said Head Coach, Chris Guess.
The warriors haven’t played a game since January 8th .
“4 games in stinks because usually it’d be about 15 by now,” said senior, Katie Dinnebier.
So, they’re playing catch up.
“We were all in quarantine for a couple of weeks so we weren’t even able to see each other so that stinks and like I said some of us are battling back from Covid,” said Dinnebier.
For Coach Chris Guess, he has to ease his team back into practice.
“You gotta look at this big picture I think 3 weeks into this until the end of the season ideally we want to be in our peak at that point in time,” said Guess.
The schedule is less friendly including Valley, Southeast Polk and Johnston.
“They’re hungry, they can’t wait to get going and it’s like this is our third season now and a chance to get on the floor and we got a heck of stretch coming up,” said Guess.
Getting things back on track the final three weeks of the season is crucial. This a team that has hopes of a state title after finishing runner up a year ago.
“It fuels us every game now that we need to amp it up even more so that we can improve and get back to where we were,” said Bartholomew
Not to mention the motivation of winning one more title before Waukee splits to two high schools next year.
“absolutely you definitely want to win it in the last year before you split but if it happens it happens if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. The key thing is you got to get there first,” said Guess.