Lady Hawks try not to look past any opponent

South Side’s girls’ basketball team appears to have had a pretty easy season so far.

Coach Brent McNeal said he tried to put together as difficult a schedule as he could, and that included three games in Florida between Christmas and New Year’s, a game against a team from Alabama with a couple of NCAA Division I signees on it during Hoopfest in December and playing at Bartlett against another out-of-state team during MLK Day weekend.

But except for a couple of early tests before Thanksgiving, the Lady Hawks have had few games that were in doubt in the fourth quarter with all wins being by more than 10 points.

That is until the Lady Hawks traveled to South Gibson on Jan. 24 to open district play and win by three points.

Senior Jakarrah Anderson said that close game was good for the Lady Hawks.

“When we play teams that we win against by a lot of points, we’re playing just as hard as if we were down by three,” Anderson said. “But having a close game at the end does make us more motivated in the fourth quarter to push a little harder because we pretty much have to.”

Junior Kimora Currie said they don’t take any opponent lightly.

“We’re undefeated, but we know that can change any night because any team can beat us if we don’t play our best,” Currie said. “So we try to have the mentality every night – give ourselves the best chance to win by playing our best no matter who the opponent is or what their record is.”

The Lady Hawks don’t appear to be taking any game for granted. North Side and Liberty aren’t just rivals within the city of Jackson. They’re also the other two teams in the district. South Side beat Liberty 64-7 on Friday and North Side 61-9 on Monday.

In the Liberty game, South Side was up 25-0 about six minutes into the game and 54-4 at halftime.

“Coach McNeal pushes us to be our best every day and not just in games,” Currie said. “In practice, in class … everything we do, South Side basketball works as hard as we can to be as good as we can in every way.”

With one run through district play, the Lady Hawks are living up to that standard, and South Gibson makes the trip to South Jackson on Friday to try to pull into a tie for first with the Lady Hawks.

“That game we played at South Gibson, we tried our best, but we didn’t play our best,” Anderson said. “We can do better than what we did, and we made a few mistakes.

“So we’ll try to not make mistakes and be ready for South Gibson. Because we know they’ll try to knock us off at home, and our senior class has never lost a game at home. We don’t want to lose one here at the end.”

Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news