Numbers up from last year at Valkyries tryouts

Bigfork High School head girls basketball coach Mark Hansen held tryouts this week for his 2009-2010 team.

The two-day event, which attracted 29 girls, included drills and testing of the athletes' running abilities, jumping and other fundamental skills.

"It went well," Hansen said after the first day. "We have some new girls coming out that we'll have to get up to speed. The returning girls hit the ground running I felt like. I saw some good thing happening."

For Hansen, the tryouts not only help him decide which girls should be on his varsity, junior varsity and freshman teams, but they also give him information to use as a benchmark for the remainder of the season.

"My tryouts are a lot like practice," Hansen said. "The only difference is we're evaluating them more while they're going through the drills. If nothing else, I use it as a teachable moment."

This is Hansen's second year as head coach of the Valkyries. He is also bringing back Jim Epperly and Mandy Williams as his assistant coaches, who will work mainly with the JV and freshman teams.

"I thought we worked well together," Hansen said of coaching with Epperly and Williams. "They bring a lot of knowledge about the game to the team. They both have different coaching philosophies and strategies about the game and that's nice to have as a head coach."

This is the third year that Williams has coached in the girls program at BHS. Hansen and Epperly both coached for the boys program prior to working with the girls last year.

"I think the more stable you can be with your coaching staff the better it is for the program," Hansen said.

Hansen and his assistants are looking to continue to improve the girls program, which made it to state for the third year in a row after placing second in the Northwest A Divisional Tournament last year.

"We sat down as a coaching staff and talked about things that worked last year that we want to continue to do this year," Hansen said. "We felt our running game and passing carried us well into the state tournament. But we also saw at state that our half court game wasn't where it needed to be. We'll have to work on shoring that up. We need to emphasize the half court for those teams that took the running game away from us. On defense we did well, except on our half court game there as well. "

Although the girls program was hurting for numbers last year, most of the athletes from the three teams are returning to play this year.

"With so many girls returning, we're not rebuilding," Hansen said. "We're just trying to continue to improve on what we need to improve on."

Some of the girls started getting ready for the basketball season in October with open gyms that were held at BHS a couple of nights each week.

"We had pretty small numbers because most of the girls were still playing volleyball, but since that's been over, we've had a pretty good turnout, about 15 to 20 girls each night," Hansen said. "That's really all you want though. You just want to get them on the court and get their basketball legs under them and get the ball in their hands."

Hansen will have his rosters completed by the end of the week and the new Vals team will begin practicing starting this weekend.