Madison County’s varsity girls’ basketball team just wrapped up its summer schedule. And coach Dan Lampe likes what he saw.
“This summer, we practiced or played everyday for the first three weeks of summer,” said Lampe. “Our main objective was to implement man-to-man defense along with working on individual fundamentals. As a coaching staff we decided to play the toughest teams we could schedule.”
This difficult slate started with Winder Barrow, a finalist team that is in now in AAAAAA, with everyone returning for their senior year.
“We beat them in a scheduled five-quarter game that we won in overtime,” said Lampe. “The next game was against Flowery Branch that had gone final four the last two years with a seasoned senior team returning. Flowery won the first half, we won the second (no official score was kept in this game).”
The Red Raiders then traveled to the University of North Georgia to play games and then finally to Lee University where they played seven games.
“As the summer progressed, so did our man defense,” said Lampe. “In the first few games, we were down big at half and had to switch back to our familiar match up zone to pull out the wins (The philosophy was that we play at least 50 percent man regardless of score). By the last few games of the summer we were able to play entirely man defense. Their communication, bumping cutters, help-side defense, on ball defense and transitioning from zone press back to man had gone from bad to good, and hopefully as the regular season starts we can become a great man defensive team.”
Lampe said “tempo is paramount” for his team to be successful.
“We are a below-average half court team, but we really flourish in the full court up-tempo game,” he said. “That became very evident in a camp that you play many games in succession. It takes energy and heart to make it work and we learned that if we didn’t bring that every game, then even far lesser athletic teams could give us trouble.”
Lampe noted that the program has had a lot of success over the past decade, playing in four region championships in a row, winning three, and then a few years later winning another. The Raiders have gone to the final four, losing by a lay up rimming out at the buzzer. They’ve made three Elite Eight appearances, including last year’s run.
“These successful teams varied a lot from year to year, but they also had a few things in common,” he said, noting that they all love to compete and work on individual fundamentals, that they love each other and love basketball.
Lampe said last year was successful, but he said nothing is guaranteed going forward.
“We are returning all players who have the opportunity to really improve from last year to this coming year,” he said. “We have some freshman who have really shown how much they will help us next year, but success only comes before work in the dictionary. If we put in the work during ‘improvement season’ then we have an opportunity. Our summer motto going into improvement season is ‘put down the phone, pick up a basketball.’”
