Tara Murray
Sunbury Jets have added more depth to their squad for this year’s Big V women’s state championship season.
The Jets made finals last season, but their depth was tested on several occasions, including in finals, with injuries.
New coach Simon Nicholson said the season had come around quickly.
“I’m reasonably happy with how we are looking,” he said.
“It hasn’t been the smoothest pre-season with injuries and what not, but hopefully we’ll be ready for round one.”
The Jets won’t be at full strength in round one, with a couple of players out injured and their second import not set to arrive to about round four.
Nicole Cameron hurt her knee and will miss the first half of the season, with Ida Andersson will miss the first couple of weeks after not coming up as soon as they would have liked after an off season procedure.
Nicholson said they think that they have the depth to cover those early absences.
“We have a bigger squad this year,” he said.
“We have a bit more depth, which late in the season and early on, will be important. We think we will have a really competitive team on court.”
Five players from last season’s squad have returned this season. Nicholson said some of their new signings will be familiar to those at Sunbury.
“We’ve got back some girls who were junior players at the Jets previously,” he said. “We’ve also got a couple of girls from the NBL1 competition.
“One big thing we wanted to do was have as many Sunbury juniors as possible. To bring back four girls who played in the VJBL [Victorian Junior Basketball League] I’m really proud to see them back in the Jets uniform.”
Nicholson said they had taken their time adding a second import to make sure they had the right person to fit in with the rest of the squad.
He said they believe they have found someone to fill the need they wanted.
The Jets start their season on March 19 against the McKinnon Cougars.
Nicholson said they were expecting it to be an interesting season.
“There’s a lot of unknown,” he said. “There’s eight teams and only one has the same coach as last season, which is Wyndham.
“There’s two new teams in the competition stepping up. There’s a lot of unknown. We’re ready to start the season and see where we are at.
The Jets men’s side starts their season on March 19 as well, taking on the Blackburn Vikings.
Nicholson said elsewhere at the Jets things were going well.
He said their junior program continued to go from strength to strength with a lot of programs pretty much at capacity.
He said it just reinforces their calls for more courts in Sunbury to meet the growing demand.
