Petersburg High School’s basketball teams played their first conference games of the season in Craig last weekend. The boys and girls teams lost all four games to Craig, but their coaches say they’re already seeing lots of improvement.
Rick Brock coaches the Viking boys. He said his players are figuring out how to play together.
“I would say we’re a work in progress,” he said. “We graduated quite a few important players. Lots of guys [are] back that were part of the team last year, but their roles this year have completely changed.”
Brock said the team got off to a slow start Friday night, and never really caught up, losing 47 to 63.
“We struggled with confidence during the game, and we haven’t played enough to have that confidence in ourselves,” he said. “And so we would make a run, but then when Craig got more aggressive against us, we just didn’t know how to respond.”
He said the players were ready to bring more energy to the court on Saturday night, and started out ahead. But some of their most experienced players got benched when they ran into foul trouble. The team slowly lost its lead. Brock said then the Craig Panthers started scoring more, and the Vikings couldn’t keep up. They lost 42 to 46.
Matt Pawuk coaches the Lady Vikings. He said the girls team is still finding its footing too.
“We had some strong leadership on the team last year with the outgoing seniors, and so [we’re] just kind of finding the identity of our team,” he said. “Some of that is on me – this is only my second year as the head coach.”
On Friday, the Lady Viking lost 32 to 59. Pawuk said the girls weren’t ready for the level of intensity the Craig Panthers brought to the court.
“We were trying to do a lot of the stuff that we had been working on in practice, and it’s a completely different animal when you’ve got five people on the court trying to prevent you from doing all those things and not worried about hurting your feelings,” he said.
Pawuk told the players that it was more about attitude than ability – and on Saturday night the team played a tougher game against Craig, even though they couldn’t quite come back from an early Panthers lead. The Vikings lost 22 to 41.
This coming weekend Petersburg will host Homecoming, playing their longtime rivals, the Wrangell Wolves. Coach Pawuk said he’s excited about the games – the girls had a great first practice after they returned from Craig.
“I had the younger kids playing defense against my older kids and like I said, not worried about hurting anybody’s feelings, not worried about anybody getting mad,” he said. “Because I think they finally realized that we’re not doing ourselves any favors by going easy on each other in practice, because other teams aren’t going to go easy on us in games.”
And, he said, the games will be fun no matter what.
“The environment at Homecoming really can’t be matched,” he said. “You’ll have half the town from Wrangell come over for it. It’s going to be packed in there. It’ll be nice and loud. You’ll have the pet band going. It’s it’s going to be a really fun environment.”
KFSK will air varsity games live both Friday and Saturday night.
