Spartans win home tournament

Justin Seward
Times Reporter

 

The Strathmore High School Spartan girls basketball team defeated Crescent Heights High School of Medicine Hat 48-33 to win their home tournament on Dec. 13.
Coach Dion Galandy was thrilled with the team’s resiliency throughout the tournament.
“We started slow, that’s kind of been our thing this year and we realize what we’ve been doing or what we haven’t been doing and we played in the second half,” said Galandy.
It was evident that with the slow starts came inconsistent play and forced the girls to battle back during the games.
“Some inconsistent play that certainly changed in the second half of each of the games where we were a little more consistent and that we made our transition from defense to offense that much smoother because we were playing some good defense.”
Galandy accredits some solid play prior to the tournament, which created momentum going in.
“We actually had a league game last Monday. We played Foothills Composite and we beat them 70-60 but that’s the first time we beat them in the last two years, so we had some momentum going into the tournament,” said Galandy.
The championship game saw the deficit 15 points for the Spartans and their work ethic helped them immensely in the comeback.
“We were down 15 points in the first quarter and then we picked it up on defense (and) stopped them from scoring, I think we went on a 15-6 run and up by one point at half 22-21 and we just kept our momentum and kept at it,” said Galandy.
“Crescent Heights unfortunately had one of their top players injured, so that could have contributed to us beating them.”