Gillette Early Bird | Video

Lee Timmerman | 12/6/2012

All of the Bismarck-Mandan and Dickinson WDA basketball teams begin next week with one exception. The Century girls are in Gillette to play an early bird tournament giving the Patriots three games in three days. The event starts today but before they hit the road, we talked with the team about what it is expecting in Gillette this week.

"It`s a little different brand of basketball. It`s a little more physical, a little more aggressive and it just depends on the team you play too and just looking at the teams you have some quality opponents we`ll be running up against. A couple of teams are pretty highly ranked in their state at this point so far," said head coach Ron Metz.

"We really need to work on some transition offenses and some defense which is where we have really struggled in practice with our defense," said senior Katie Chase.

Century plays Kelly Walsh of Casper, Gillette`s Campbell County, and Rockridge. But the biggest focus this week is on themselves.

"The big thing is finding our identity of where we are as a team with the number of seniors we lost last year and with this group that we have this year. It`s a big turnover and transition as far as this group that we have and the girls are going to have different roles and being able to identify those roles and get a lot of those things figured out so it`s going to be great to be able to go down there and we got some unknowns with the opponents we are playing but we`re not worried much about what they`re doing mostly focusing on what we`re doing and need to accomplish," Metz said.

The Patriots big picture goal is to accomplish what they did last year, win the state championship, but of Century`s top eight players, Hannah Larson is the only one returning this year.

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