WOODBURY — The Woodbury Middle School girls basketball team finished the season with an impressive 13-3 record.
Adam Brutting, WMS’s eighth-grade ELA teacher and girls basketball coach, felt like the basketball season went very well.
“I think this basketball season was a huge success,” he said. “I think the team grew a great deal from the beginning of the season to the end.”
And this is true. The girls basketball team lost only 3 times but to 3 different teams: Shepaug Valley Middle School, Memorial Middle School, and Seymour Middle School. All these games were lost at the beginning of the season, but when Woodbury played them a second time, the games went totally different, with WMS coming out on top.
Michael Hadoulis, Woodbury Middle School’s cooking teacher, as well as the girls basketball coach, offered his thoughts about the game against Memorial.
“I think a lot about Memorial,” Hadoulis stated. “I think in our first game, we put up 17 points, and then we put up 40 in the second game.”
Everybody was proud of the performance during the season. Especially Jayda Gladding, an eighth-grade student and starter on the girls basketball team.
“I felt happy. It was really good to beat a team that we didn’t beat before,” said Gladding.
So what was the secret behind these monumental wins? The girls basketball team got really good very quickly, but how? Both coaches presented their opinions on the question.
“As the season goes on, you start to figure things out,” said Hadoulis, “We set up much better on the offensive side of the ball. We were able to create opportunities for our offense to score, put points on the board where we weren’t able to do that earlier in the year.”
Brutting added, “I think a big part of who we were this year was a team that grew a lot. I think at the beginning of the season, they were just not fully understanding each other and meshing together. (We had) better team defense as the year went on, which creates more turnovers. The full court defense creates more havoc, too. And then just the offense, like any season, evolves and gets better. Players were a little sharper as the season went on: better shooting, knew each other better, shared the ball better.”
Some might think that with all this growth throughout the season, there would be no time to have fun. But this is definitely not true. Gladding provides some insight on what the team vibe really was like.
“It was definitely fun. It was chill. You know, we just all meshed energy,” Gladding said. “I think it was more like we were all one this year instead of being the 8th graders were a group, the 7th graders were a group. We were a good clique, even from the first practice.”
Even the coaches had fun throughout the season. The team had a great vibe and really put in the work.
“It was a lot of fun to be a part of,” Hadoulis said, “I mean, winning is always more fun than losing is, but there was something really special about the raw material that the team put together, because it was a lot of fun to go out there and coach.”
