Summer shootouts offer area girls basketball teams chance to develop leadership, continuity

QUINCY — Brown County girls basketball coach Dave Phelps sometimes has to give his two-time all-state scoring sensation Kenzie Kassing a friendly reminder during summer games.

“She wants to win, win, win all the time, and keeping her from getting frustrated with herself in the summer is important because this is her opportunity to be a leader for those younger girls and the girls in her class,” Phelps said.

Kassing, now a junior on a Hornets team with no seniors, has taken that responsibility to heart, pointing to this summer as her most important yet.

“The main thing is keeping my head and keeping a positive attitude, especially whenever it gets frustrating,” Kassing said. “I’ve just been working on that because whenever I have a better attitude, I uplift everybody else on the team. I have to remember that’s my role now.”

Summer camps and shootouts like the one held at Quincy High School on Thursday and Friday are the ideal places for Kassing and other players to get acclimated to a new team climate and establish roles.

“Different coaches have different philosophies on the summer,” Phelps said. “Mine is, more than anything else, to give the younger girls a chance to play with the older girls and give those older girls a chance to figure out some leadership in helping the younger girls as we play. We had a couple freshmen who were struggling knowing where we’re supposed to be, getting overloaded with, ‘Where do I have to be in this situation?’ We try to make it not as competitive as the regular season and try to make it easier for them, so they can think, ‘OK, I can make a mistake here and Coach Phelps isn’t going to yell at me.’ 

“I try to make it fun for them while also giving them an opportunity to work on their skills, like, ‘In this game, we’re going to try to do this, and in this game, we’re going to try to do that. After this game, we need to work on this. We didn’t do this very well.’ It’s an opportunity for them to get better as individuals and gel as a team, as well.”

The casual yet competitive nature of summer games allow teams to get situational work done. For example, in the final game on Friday between Quincy and West Hancock, after two 10-minute periods, the teams decided to put two minutes on the clock and give Quincy an eight-point lead. After those two minutes, the scenario was flipped and West Hancock was up by eight.

West Hancock coach Jerry Jerome said the Titans’ execution during that first two-minute stretch was not great, but the unique setting of a summer shootout allows them to work on such things.

“It was a situation where we needed to score points and we’re dribbling around, but we don’t get that opportunity,” Jerome said. “We don’t get enough practice time. We’re just trying to put things in and do things like that. I thank Quincy very much for allowing us to do that.”

Summer games also give teams the chance to try out new offensive and defensive schemes, like the Titans did in their three games on Friday.

“We’re really trying to get our defense down because we’re switching it up from what we did last year,” Titans senior forward Jadyn Climer said. “We didn’t really play man last year, and this year, that’s our big focus. Also, with our offense, instead of having a lot of plays, we just have our one base play and we do different actions off of it.”

The same goes for Quincy on the defensive side. Blue Devils junior guard Cameron Byquist said they plan on playing more man defense this season, and summer games give them extra reps to ensure they understand the tenants of that defense ahead of the regular season.

“We can do a wide range of things,” Byquist said. “We can sit down in a zone, but we can also man up if we need to. It’s not that we don’t know what these things are. We can play man defense, and we can play zone. It’s just helping us prepare for the season.”

On the other side of the ball, Blue Devils junior forward Jada Brown said practicing their plays and sets during this time allows them to hit the ground running when the season starts in November.

“It’s really important,” Brown said. “We won’t have to take the time to work on the plays. We can work on the things we actually need to work on.”

The summer also gives players like Byquist a chance to blossom.

“She’s done well on both ends of the court,” Blue Devils coach Brad Dance said of Byquist. “She can run the floor, she can score the ball from the outside, then when you come out and guard her, she can get to the rim. She can guard really well. She’s shown her maturity the last couple days.”

In a nutshell, summer shootouts provide a foundation on which to build.

“Especially early in the basketball season, you try to refer back to the summer and think, ‘Remember when we played this team in the summer and we ran this, or we worked on this?’” Phelps said. “That’s what we want to focus on.”

Whether that is fundamentals, filling new roles, or installing new schemes, the summer enables teams to work on things in a game-like setting — the perfect marriage of competition and learning opportunities.

Like Kassing, Byquist said she and her teammates must be cognizant of the purpose the summer serves in preparing them for the real deal.

“Summer is like a big long practice for what is important ahead,” Byquist said. “We just have to realize this isn’t what we’re working for. This is just practice for what’s coming up.”