King finds the perfect mix
Lady Generals eye first undefeated regular season
Sure, the Milwaukee King girls basketball team returned four starters that finished 15-9 last season. But did Generals coach Craig Machut expect to be 20-0? “Nope,” he said. “We scheduled some of the best teams in the area and four really incredibly tough out-of-state games and somehow this team has responded in those games in ways I definitely did not expect. I thought we would easily take four to six losses this season. But it is a surprise to be undefeated.
“In all honesty, the undefeated record doesn’t mean as much to me as the
growth we’ve done over the year. The record is kind of second to who we’ve become as a team.”
King is ranked 23rd in the country by USA Today and No. 2 in the Associated Press Division 1 poll state poll. A victory Tuesday at Milwaukee Vincent would result in the the first undefeated regular season record for the girls basketball in school history, according to Machut.
“I expected a lot from my team, even though we still are so young,” said King sophomore center Sydnee Roby, who leads the Generals in scoring (17.2 points per game) and rebounding (11.2). “Because I know the potential that we have and I know what we can do. Even saying that, I never expected us to be undefeated.”
The team was 15-9 last season despite four sophomores and six freshmen on the roster. That investment in youth, and defense, are the main reasons why King is 7-0 in the City Conference Gold Division and won its fifth straight championship.
“Last year was like the beginning of a long journey,” sophomore Annaly Garcia said.
Senior captain Jada Patterson, on her fourth varsity season, remembers encouraging and helping out the younger players and getting them prepared to meet the program’s expectations.
“So that they don’t feel like an outsider,” she said. “We did a lot of team activities outside of basketball to make sure the freshmen and new sophomores feel comfortable. Once we got out on the court, it seemed like everybody had been clicking for years.
Machut says the team grew “leaps and bounds” by the end of last season, but this year decided to not focus on zone defenses as much. Now, man to man is the Generals’ calling card.
“Because we’re athletic enough to cause teams some match-up problems,” Machut said.
Patterson is the lone senior starter. Junior Tishara Morehouse, who is second on the team with 11.5 points a game and 5.5 rebounds, starts. So do three sophomores: Roby, Kaye Clark (11.2 points) and Garcia (10.6 points).
King won its first five games of the season by an average of 30 points and then went 3-0 at the She Got Game Classic in Washington. The Generals also earned impressive wins over Geneva, Ill., New Berlin Eisenhower, Arrowhead and Sussex Hamilton.
All that’s left is for King to fix is its playoff problem.
The Generals have lost in the regional finals every time since finishing as state runner-up in 2012. They fell to Brookfield Central the previous two years after being eliminated by Divine Savior Holy Angels the two years before that.
“That was very frustrating,” Machut said. “Things just seemed to go wrong at the wrong times the last couple of years — all for different reasons.”
King is seeded No. 1 this season, but its coach was not about to look ahead.
“What are anybody’s chances down the road?” Machut said. “It’s too difficult to think about or predict. We’re a pretty good team, but we have an awful big target on our back and that’s going to make things challenging.”