By Blake Santana
Bronco girls’ basketball squad is hoping to turn things around from last season’s finish and get into black figures this year.
Coming off an 8-10 finish last season, Alvirne’s girls’ basketball team is trying to potentially have just a couple more positive results and earn a winning record and a home playoff game this season.
The Lady Broncos are going to need some players to step up their game from a year ago, as four of the team’s top five scoring players graduated in June of this past year-those players being Allyssa Scharn (9.6 PPG), Paige McKinnley (8.5 PPG), Jaime O’Connor (7.7 PPG), and Lyla Davis (3.8 PPG). The only one remaining of the top five scorers last season is Ella Hartson, who put up 5.1 points per game in 14 games.
Also returning for Alvirne will be Lexi Floyd, Sadie Rogers, Rachel Allard, Taryn Macklin, Julia Adams, Haylie Christman, and Dani Wimmer, all of whom will play a big role in getting this team back to the promised land of the playoffs. It seems, though, that the girls will have to rely heavily on their defense to play a major role this season, as all four players to graduate were near the top of the roster in scoring.
The girls will play in the Nashua Preseason Jamboree starting on Dec. 2, where we will get a better view of where the team truly stands for this upcoming year as far as players taking steps forward and who will make major impacts for newcomers to the Varsity roster, before traveling to Portsmouth High School on December 12 to play the Clippers.
The home opener for the ladies will be on Friday night, Dec. 15, starting at 6:30 p.m. against the Pinkerton Astros, which will be a good early test for the Broncos and will serve as a measuring stick type of game.
Like the boys’ team, Alvirne’s Lady Broncos will have no road trips longer than two games over the course of their 18-game regular season, but they will have the benefit of a slightly longer homestand than the longest one the boys have at three games where between the 11th and 23rd of January, they will host Manchester Memorial, Trinity, and Londonderry, all from the friendly confines of the Barn. Perhaps that home-court advantage will help the team get some key victories over three opponents who appear to be very tough games going into the season. Granted, a lot can happen between now and mid-January, and we can only hope that what does happen between now and then works in the favor of Alvirne.
Alvirne does have the luxury of not having defending champions, and arguably the school’s biggest rival as a whole in the Bishop Guertin Cardinals on their schedule aside from a scrimmage at Rivier College just before the season opener. That game will take place on Dec. 7.
The girls will play 6 of the teams who made it to the elite 8 last season, with only Bishop Guertin and Concord being left off the schedule. This includes the final two games of the year at home against 2023’s runner-up Bedford Bulldogs on February 20th and then a trip to Goffstown to play last year’s fourth-place finishers in the Grizzlies on February 23rd to wrap up their regular season.
If the Broncos can sneak out a couple of wins against those top teams, it’s genuinely plausible that this team can finish over .500 in the regular season and secure possibly a top 8 seed and host a playoff game. If things don’t go their way, however, it could be another year of barely sneaking into the tournament and then banking on a major upset to make their way into the second round of the tournament.