Crawfordsville girls basketball will be under new leadership this season. The Athenians are now under the guidance of Joe Ferguson who takes over for former coach Tyler Smith. CHS is coming off a year where they went 7-16. This year will also mark Ferguson’s first varsity head coaching job as he’s bounced around a few different boys teams mainly in the Wabash River Valley Conference.
After he was named the head coach Ferguson immediately went to work and now with the new season upon them, he believes it’s an exciting time to see where his group stands.
“The girls are all excited to get the year underway,” Ferguson said. “That’s one of the biggest things that I’m going to try and keep up is the excitement level this year. We don’t want to have the roller coaster effect of having the ups and downs. We know that will go through some losses but also have our wins and we just want no matter what happens on the court, we want to keep that energy and excitement level throughout the season.”
Cville returns it’s leading scorer and rebounder in Taylor Abston for her senior season. A season ago Abston scored 12.1 points per game while grabbing nine rebounds and having 2.3 blocks per game while shooting 72% from the foul line. Madi Hedrick along with Addi Hodges will also be key seniors for the Athenians this season. Throw in junior Celeste Moore and sophomore Molly Pierce and CHS has a core group of returning players to rely on.
Ferguson notes how he’s been impressed with a variety of things with this group during practice. Coming from coaching boys can be provide its challenges, but Ferguson has adapted and so has his team.
“These girls don’t need to be told to work hard in practice,” he said. “That’s what has stood out to me probably the most. They want to get better and rarely do I have to tell them what they need to do to do that. When our coaching staff is talking with them, they absorb everything and are very coach-able. Sometimes they’ll come up to me or text me and ask me if they can get extra work in. I knew a few of these girls would be like that, but I’ve been blown away by how many are willing to put that extra time in.”
While the Athenians have the typical goals as a team of wanting to compete for a county title, Sugar Creek Classic title etc., Ferguson wants his team to also focus on getting better throughout the course of the long season. He’s not too concerned about measuring success in the win and loss column.
“The girls did tell me that they want to win county because that’s important to them,” he said. “We want to start competing well in the conference as well. My overall goal for this season is building this program from the ground up and really starting to set a culture. At the end of the day if we still have girls here at the end of the season who love basketball and want to be here, that’s what we’re trying to accomplish here.”
Crawfordsville will open up the 2023-24 season on Thursday when they welcome in the Seeger Patriots. You can catch a live broadcast of the game on WIMC 103.9 beginning at roughly 7:10 with Jared McMurry and Codey Emerson.
