TURNERS FALLS — The high school basketball season is still over five months away, but that hasn’t stopped local teams from finding ways to improve during the offseason.
One of those ways is at the Franklin Tech Girls Summer Basketball League, which features Athol, Franklin Tech, Frontier, Hopkins Academy, Greenfield, Mahar, Mohawk Trail and Pioneer.
The league runs twice a week throughout the summer, and all eight squads were in action on Tuesday.
“Three years ago we really wanted an opportunity to have girls play summer basketball,” Franklin Tech girls varsity coach Joe Gamache said. “This is where you can increase the level of play in this area. A lot of times there’s not a lot of opportunities for them. There’s always opportunities for the boys. We wanted to give them the same chance to get to play this time of year.”
Franklin Tech played Pioneer on Tuesday, a league matchup during the regular season. It was a good chance for both teams to get a feel for what the other will look like next winter, as well as seeing where each team is at with a long way to go before the season.
For the Eagles, that’s finding out how to replace Kendra Campbell, who ran the point for Tech last year.
“This is a great chance to improve on stuff,” Franklin Tech’s Kait Trudeau said. “We lost [Kendra Campbell] so it’s a new team. We’re all learning to play together and this is a great chance to do that.”
Mahar is another team looking to use the summer to gain chemistry as a team. It earned a hard fought win over Greenfield on Tuesday, and the two teams will be squaring off again when the regular season rolls around come December.
While the goal of summer league isn’t always to win games, getting to play a tightly-contested game this time of year will pay dividends down the road as a young Mahar team looks to gel together.
“It’s been good,” Mahar’s Nevaeh Scribner said. “We’ve had a good season so far. This has been going better than last season.”
The summer is a good time for skill work, but also a time to develop chemistry. The majority of the returning Senators are playing in the Franklin Tech Summer League, and it provides a great chance to work on all the little things that go into basketball games while learning how to communicate and play together as a team.
“We want to work on our communication and switching on defense,” Scribner said. “We need to talk more and have more chemistry than we had last year. That’s been way better than it was last year. We’ve come a long way.”
Mohawk Trail is another team competing in the Franklin Tech Summer League, and through four games, Valerie Bzomowski said she has seen her team continue to make progress and grow as a unit.
“This is only our fourth game,” Bzomowski said. “We’re coming together.”
It wasn’t the season Mohawk Trail hoped to have last winter. The summer has been dedicated to working on their craft, coming together as a team and learning how to play with one another.
The Warriors will once again be a young team this upcoming winter, but Bzomowski said she hopes the hard work put in this summer will pay dividends when the games begin to count in December. She’s already seeing improvements with each game.
“We’re working on our sportsmanship and team work,” Bzomowski said. “We’re working on passing the ball instead of just trying to do everything yourself. We’re definitely working better as a team.”