Register-Mail First Practice

The following is the RM article on our first practice.....

GALESBURG —

The Galesburg High School girls basketball team began their season on Monday with an early morning and an evening practice.

Galesburg coach Evan Massey, who is entering his 35th season at the helm of the Silver Streaks, said this year’s team should have more offense than last year’s team, which finished with an overall mark of 27-6 and advanced to the sectional semifinals.

“We return a pretty athletic group,” he said. “Last year, our greatest strength was we were a better defensive team than offensive team and this year we’ve improved offensively.

“Hopefully, we are a deeper group this year,” Massey added. “This fall, we happened to have a lot of girls not involved in fall sports and there was enough of them that they got to play.”

Fall Was Insane

We have always felt it has been important to our team to be very involved in the weight room. We started a strong commitment to the weight room in the mid-1990's when Coach Peachey came on as an assistant coach. He developed a strong lifting program for us, and it was incredible the difference it made for us.

The best example of the importance of strength training for us was our 1999 team, which took 2nd in State. (It should be noted that was back in the days before 4-classes where we had to go thru all the big schools in Illinois). In 1998, we made it to the Elite 8 but were crushed by Loyola. Loyola had several DI players, and was rated nationally. We returned everyone from the '98 team. So while we were excited about the prospects of having everyone back, we realized the team who had crushed us, Loyola, also had everyone back.