History on the basketball court
Michaela Gleed, Staff Writer
Courtesy of Alicia Lynn
North Greenville University women’s basketball team marked history with their 2017-2018 season.
Junior captain Elizabeth Trentham said, “the team was not supposed to make it to the conference tournament as they had led a losing season. We played well and would be winning a lot of our games until the third quarter. Then we would just stop playing and go down.”
During regular season play, the team held a record of seven wins and eighteen losses with two losses during preseason which entered them as the last seed in the conference tournament. Limestone College was the number one seed for the tournament and would fall 56-57 to North Greenville in the first round.
“I was not surprised by the outcome, the team we showed in the conference tournament is the team we had all along and we didn’t quite show that all year long,” said senior point guard Cameron Carter.
This win against Limestone College pushed NGU women’s basketball to the second round of the conference tournament which was new territory for the Crusaders. They played King University and lost 71-72.
The game was tight throughout and Trentham said, “King was good, but the referees played a big role in it.” The game came down to a technical foul against the Crusaders late in the game with King putting away one of the two technical free throws.
The Crusaders ended their first season with Coach Willis Holliday with an 8-21 record, eighth in the conference and with NGU’s first appearance in the second round of the Conference Carolinas tournament.
Holliday joined North Greenville University after building a lengthy resume of success in coaching both men’s and women’s teams at all levels of competition. Holliday traveled to Munich, Germany as an assistant coach for the USA High School Olympic team in 2001.
Holiday’s first season at North Greenville did not start out as positively as they were hoping, but the team leaned into the process and preformed how they needed to when it mattered for the conference tournament.
Trentham said the team is optimistic about the coaching change. “I think I speak for everyone (the team) when I say that it is a turning point for our program.”
The Crusaders graduated three seniors from the program after the 2018 season. The remaining members of the team began off-season training Monday, March 19 after two weeks of rest and recuperation. During the spring off-season, the team will be lifting weights with Coach Kaitlynn Bernardi twice a week and developing positional skills individually in the gym.
When the team returns to campus for the fall semester, they will be adding four freshman team members. The training routine will follow as the spring off-season. In late September, they will begin training together for the season which will begin near the end of October.
