Ravens are a work in progress
By Bob Nuse, The Packet Group
Patrick Anderson knows the Robbinsville High girls basketball team is a work in progress.
That’s one reason why last week’s 50-42 win over Princeton was so important to the Ravens’ first-year head coach. He wanted his players to see some positive results for all of the hard work they have put in this season.
”We’ve played a lot of close games,” said Anderson, whose team earned its second win and snapped a nine-game losing streak with the win over Princeton. “I still think we can make this a competitive season. We have scorers, but our biggest staple is going to be our defense. If we play the kind of defense I think we can play, then we can hang in there with most of the basketball teams we play.”
The Ravens did that in the win over Princeton, building a 19-point lead in the first half behind some solid defensive play. The win helped ease the pain of some tough losses, most of which came late in the game.
”We always come real close, but at the end in the last two quarters we seem to find a way to lose it,” said junior guard Taylor Mayweather, who led the Ravens with 11 points in the win over the Little Tigers. “This time we picked it up and kept it constant throughout the entire game.
”It’s usually at the start of the third quarter that we start to lose it and go downhill. This time we came close, but we came back and scored and kept the lead.”
Princeton got as close as eight points, but never closer. Robbinsville used a balanced scoring effort that saw Amanda Orlak and Christine Levering add eight points apiece, while Allison Guido had seven points and Nicole Yap added six.
”We have four seniors, so the rest of the team is juniors and sophomores,” Mayweather said. “So we’re a pretty young team. We want to try to continue winning and see if we can get into states. A lot of our losses have been real close games.”
Mayweather is one of a group of players that spend the whole year working on her basketball skills. They hope that effort and hard work pay off down the road.
”I play AAU in the spring and a lot of the other girls also play,” Mayweather said. “And we do summer league and have been working together as a team. We have to keep playing all year round.
”We’re learning new things and there are things we can improve on. We’re working with the new freshmen and we have three coaches that really help us out a lot and give us good direction.”
Anderson hopes that as his team plays some of the teams it lost to earlier a second time, that the results can be different.
”The girls played extremely well from top to bottom,” he said after the win over Princeton. “I was very happy with how they came out. I think we kind of caught them off guard by pressing them a little bit.
”We get to play a lot of these teams again. We’re at about the halfway point to our season and we can have a resurgence to out season and win a few in a row and get back into the thick of it. I tell them to never give up.”
Even with some injuries that have kept some of the veteran players out of the lineup, the Ravens have kept working hard.
”We’ve had some injuries to our starters that have kept them out,” said Anderson, whose team fell to 2-10 with a 51-36 loss to West Windsor-Plainsboro North last Friday. “One of our starting seniors, Rachel Stepian, will probably be out another week. She had a concussion a few weeks back and that has been a tough one. We try to make the adjustment. If we continue to play as a team we can continue to improve.”