The East Clarendon High School varsity girls’ basketball team won the region championship in the 2016-17 season, ultimately falling in the first round of the state playoffs.
The Lady Wolverines finished the season with a respectable 15-8 record.
“We only lost one senior from last year,” said head coach Mike Lowder. “Everyone else is back. In addition to that, we’ve also added two girls off the junior varsity team who will help us this year.”
He said the 11 players on the team recently had their first scrimmage.
“It was good to see the girls play,” he said. “You don’t keep score. You play five and then take them out and put five new ones in. You see how they work together.”
Lowder said he thinks the team is “a good bit further ahead of the game than we were this time last year.”
Part of that is due to leadership from his senior co-captains Gracen Watts and Caitlin Timmons.
“They were my captains last year as well,” he said. “They’re what I would call my two coaches on the floor.”
Watts and Timmons, Lowder said, are respected by their teammates.
“The girls look up to them,” he said. “They’re the ones everyone looks to for guidance when I’m not there in the game myself.”
He said one up-and-coming player will be Tylasia Cooper, an eighth-grade student in the middle school who went All-State last season as a seventh-grader on the junior varsity team.
“She will be a major contributor; she had the lead score on the team last year,” Lowder said.
Asked what would make a player so good at such a young age, Lowder said it’s because Cooper “eats, sleeps and breathes the game.”
“She’s about 5-foot-11 and still growing,” he said. “Her biggest thing is that she grew up playing outside. She plays every day, no matter what. She plays with the guys year-round. She’s just a competitor. I don’t know any other way to describe it, other than she loves the game. She wants to play at the next level when the time comes. She’s on the court all the time, and that’s what you have to do to achieve that kind of goal. I remember riding by for several years and seeing her playing out in 100-degree weather. She’s wide open.”
