Like all coaches, Cheney High School girls’ basketball head coach JT Johnson would like to have had a couple games go a different way during his first season at the helm of the Lady Blackhawks. That said, Johnson feels good about how the season finished.
“I think we got exactly what we wanted,” Johnson said. “We finished right where I thought we would.”
The Lady Blackhawks finished fourth overall in the five-team Great Northern League, posting a 3-9 record and notching wins over West Valley and Pullman — the latter twice including a gritty 45-41 win on the road Jan. 9. Cheney made it three out of four against the Greyhounds with a 50-38 win in the opening round of the district playoffs, again coming on the road in Whitman County.
Overall Cheney was 8-15, posting non-league wins over Lakeland, Idaho; Lake Roosevelt in the West Valley holiday tournament and Medical Lake in the annual Golden Feather Spirit Game. The Lady Blackhawks opened the season with road losses to Reardan, 45-36, and Freeman, 60-54, and consecutive nights, games Johnson said he would love to have back along with the two losses to West Valley, 47-43 at home Dec. 12 and 53-47 at home Jan. 30.
The latter came near the end of a five-game losing streak that if the Lady Blackhawks had managed a couple of wins, especially over the Eagles and Pullman, would have earned them the No. 3 seed in the playoffs and a home post-season game. Johnson said they were impacted in that final stretch by the loss to injury of their point guard, sophomore Hannah Lemelin, which required putting new players in a position they weren’t familiar with playing.
Still, Johnson felt his players performed well, especially when dealing with adversity, and now have a solid base to build on thanks to a year under his system. They also have some good players waiting in the wings, especially off a junior varsity team that went 17-3 and a C squad/frosh squad that also performed well.
“It will be tough to make varsity next year,” Johnson said. “We’ve got some good classes coming in. If you were on varsity, or were a starter, you might not be in that (role) next year.”
Johnson said the team needs to work on being better offensively, becoming more of a scoring threat. Defensively, the Lady Blackhawks were solid in 2015-2016 and bought in to his philosophy — aggressively pressing full court in zone and then switching to man-to-man when opponents cross the mid-court line.
Johnson is looking forward to working on this during summer league ball, and is already scheduling games against teams several classifications above Cheney’s, and is hoping to arrange some out of town tournaments trips to provide the girls opportunities to bond as a unit.
Johnson and CHS athletics director Gregg Hare are already working on next year’s schedule, one Johnson said they hope to make tougher than the one just finished. Cheney’s non-league schedule already includes Idaho 5A Lake City, and possibly Coeur d’Alene, and they are hoping to hear back from a couple 2A schools from the Central Washington Athletic Conference’s Mid-Columbia League.
Johnson also plans to increase Cheney’s participation at the West Valley holiday tournament from two games to three.
“We need that higher level of competition,” he said. “We need to get pushed those three games.”
John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.
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