AKRON – Entering his third season at the helm of Tippecanoe Valley’s girls basketball program, coach Chris Kindig has to replace his two leading scorers, as well as the leadership they and a classmate provided. After posting a 5-15 record in Kindig’s first year, the Lady Vikings were 15-6 overall and 5-2 in the Three Rivers Conference last season. The team was hit hard by graduation, though, and gone are Staci Groom, Tory Keirn and Megan Bibler. Groom, who Kindig believes was the best player in the area, averaged 22 points per game. Keirn added 11 points per game. Both were Times-Union All-Area selections. “We lost a great group of seniors,” said Kindig, whose team graduated 65 percent of its points from last year. “Not only did we lose their scoring, but we’re gonna miss their leadership. We have talent and plenty of potential with this year’s group. Right now we’re trying to find someone to lead us.” Valley’s varsity roster lists nine players – seniors Danielle Bussard, Courtney Newsome and Connor Fraser; juniors Cara Hoffman, Robyn Dunnuck, Kelsey Ball and Sara Alexander; and sophomores Taylor Trippiedi and Caylie Teel. Of those players, Ball and Teel are the leading scorers returning, as both averaged about five points per game last season, while Bussard chipped in with four points per game. “The seniors are doing a good job so far in that regard,” Kindig said of this season’s leadership. “We’re going to play the way we play. We’re going to get up and down the floor, and hopefully that will lead to a lot of layups. When you lose a lot of offense, a lot of times you try and make up for it by playing better defense. Potentially, we could be a better team. We’re not going to rely on one or two players so much. We have seven or eight girls who could score 10 or 15 points on any given night.” The Lady Vikings open the season Thursday at Bremen, and then travel to county rival Warsaw on Nov. 16. Valley tips off TRC play Dec. 1 by hosting Wabash. “We want to win the conference, much like we did last year, and we want to win our Thanksgiving tournament, which we did last year,” said Kindig. “It’s going to be difficult to duplicate last year’s record, but the expectations are certainly higher than they were in my first year. The girls know what to expect now. They know we can win games.”
