Last season coaching basketball....

Coaching has been one of my favorite aspects of teaching high school. This was my third season coaching at Karl G. Maeser Preparatory Academy. I'll give you a brief recap of each season.

First Season 2008 - 2009
This was my first year coaching. How did I become the girls' basketball coach? The Athletic Director came to me at the start of the year and said, "You're tall. Do you play basketball?" After my emphatic "yes!" he asked if I wanted to coach. It's always been my dream to coach high school basketball so I immediately accepted. Maeser Prep is a charter school so this season we played in the charter school league with 6 different teams. We did pretty well, considering my girls didn't even know how to jump stop let alone dribble or shoot. I mean they looked like 3rd graders learning how to play the game. We drilled fundamentals over and over in practice. By the end of the season they actually looked like a basketball team. They made HUGE improvement. I wish I had the film to prove it. Our win/loss record was 8/4 for the season and 10/6 including tournament. We ended up with 3rd place. Not too bad. Our first game in the tournament was against Paradigm High School. Going in to the tourney we had each won twice against each other. This was it, the tie breaker. Well, we ended up losing by 2 points in DOUBLE overtime. It was a really good game, one of the best I've coached. Because the tourney was double elimination, we won our next two and then we met up with Paradigm again in the semi-finals. Unfortunately we lost to them again. They were our best competition. This was a challenging year with teaching the girls the fundamentals and practicing at the American Fork Armory. It's HARD not having your own gym. But it turned out well!

Second Season 2009 - 2010
This year, Maeser Prep left the charter school league and stepped up into the big leagues. We officially because part of the Utah High School Activities Association as a 2A school. It was a good move to become more officially recognized in the sports world, but also knowing that we were going to get crushed by public schools who have been playing for years and years with great sports programs was a little daunting.

I started the year out coaching the volleyball team. The biggest challenges I dealt with were teaching the girls how to serve overhand (the coach before me didn't teach this) and teaching them to get the ball, no matter what. They were a little timid and if the ball was in someone else's area, they wouldn't even worry about it or step in and take it. Even though we didn't win any games, we DID get to go to State (2A tournament) at UVU and our biggest accomplishment was our improvement on the court. We even had an Academic All-State.

Baksetball. Again, no gym this year. Because the American Fork Armory was undergoing rennovation, we traded off practicing at Pleasant Grove Jr. High and an elementary school out in Alpine - the court was crap. We'll take what we can get though. This year our basketball skills were much better and we had tremendous improvement, again. Our win/loss record shows otherwise, but building up a program takes time. Our Athletic Director failed to schedule any pre-season games for us and was thus replaced. I lost my best player (point guard and top scorer) to an ACL injury before our first game. That took her out for the rest of the season. She hasn't been the same since either. Although, we didn't make it to State, we did have an Academic All-State.

This year for both volleyball and basketball I coached the Freshmen and Varsity teams. I would have done JV as well, but the UHSAA didn't grant us permission for a JV team since we didn't yet have our own gym. This was the first year I actually had an assistant coach too.

Third Season 2010 - 2011
What a season! We finally put a few wins on the board! I stepped down as Head Coach this year due to time constraints with other responsibilities (applying to PA school and finishing up my Master's in Education). Thus I coached JV and assisted with both Varsity and Freshmen. We finally had 3 different coaches for the 3 teams. It made a world of difference too. The Varsity Head Coach is fabulous too. She played ball in college and has a lot to bring to the table. The JV team's win/loss record is a little better than Varsity's win/loss record. We came away with 4 or 5 wins. And you can see the schedule is much better stacked than last year's. I had to schedule all the pre-season games myself considering the situation last year. The best part of this season was that we FINALLY had our own gym! Fans actually showed up to cheer us on. This has been our best year yet. Yes, it's nice to win. Everybody wants to win. But this season we focused a lot more on individual focus and improvement. We really did have a successful season, but not based on our season record. We found something worthy to achieve for and achieve it we did. Each player made huge strides in their individual performance. Next year.....look out!

Our program is continuing to improve, slowly, but surely. In the next few years we will be competitive enough to finally give some of these teams a run for their money. I'm sad I will no longer be a part of it, but you better bet I'll still be supporting my team.

Here's my siblings and I after our last JV win of the season. They are all sportin' their Maeser gear to show their support. Good luck in the future Maeser!