Tara Murray
The Sunbury Jets will spend the last few rounds of the regular Big V women’s state championship division season fine tuning their game.
The Jets had secured a top four and finals spot heading in the weekend’s game, with the side to finish the regular season in either third or fourth.
Speaking before Saturday night’s loss to the Bulleen Boomers, Jets coach Ben Draper said it was nice to have locked in a finals spot already.
“We would have liked a home final and finished in higher spot, but we dropped a couple of matches early in the piece that we shouldn’t have,” he said.
“I think we knew that we would be here. We knew who we had coming [Maria Jespersen and Ida Andersson], but we had a few hiccups early in the piece with injuries and sickness.”
Draper said the period of the middle of the year, when they beat the other three sides in the top four in consecutive weeks, had shown what they can do on court.
“Wyndham beat us early in the piece, so to come back and beat them comfortably and we were comfortable for most part of the game was nice,” he said.
“To finally have a full team against McKinnon and then we beat Bulleen. To beat the teams that were third, second and first in a row, makes us comfortable heading into finals.”
Draper said some of the youth league players, who were called on when they were short of numbers, don’t realise how good a job they did to get the side into the position they were in.
The pressure is off some of them, who have returned to playing in the youth league competition.
While the Jets beat the Boomers earlier in the season, they weren’t able to repeat that on Saturday night.
The Boomers jumped out of the blocks, leading 28-13 at quarter time. They would control the next two quarters, before the Jets won the final quarter 21-16.
It wasn’t enough with the Boomers winning, 88-63.
Jespersen top scored with 28 points to be the standout. Andersson struggled to get her shot to fall, shooting just two from 12 from the field.
Draper said before that match, that wins and losses weren’t the most important thing in this run of matches.
“We have a couple of things to work on and to keep testing,” he said.
“We want to execute with the ball and get the ball where we want it to be. It’s more than wins or losses, it’s more important to get everything right for finals.”
Meanwhile, the Jets state championship men’s side has claimed the minor premiership with two rounds remaining.
On Saturday night, the Jets had a big win against the Camberwell Dragons.
The win was set up with a 30-5 first quarter, with the Jets shooting 87.5 per cent from the field and 50 per cent from the three-point line.
Ish Sanders top scored with 30 points as the minutes got shared round and all but one player hit the scoreboard.
The Jets sit three games clear of Wyndham with just two games remaining.
