CREDIT: MELANIE ANDERSON
Point guard Janine DeLeon practices her layups prior to the 2012 season.

The Fanshawe women's basketball team is on track to a successful season after grabbing gold in their first exhibition tournament held at Loyalist College. In their opening game, they defeated two-time defending provincial champions Algonquin College. They defeated Loyalist College in the semis, and went on to beat Champlain College 72-59 in the finals.

“I felt we played great pressure defence the entire weekend and rebounded the ball well,” said head coach Matt White, “Our conditioning proved to be a factor as well and is a testament to how hard the players have worked in the preseason to prepare for the upcoming year.”

White has been preparing the girls for the upcoming season with practices twice a week over the summer in addition to individual workouts. Now the team is practicing five or six times per week. Janine DeLeon is a Civil Engineering student at Fanshawe and point guard for the team; she said the coaching is at its best, “Coaching's awesome. I couldn't ask for better coaches, they're very reasonable and they look at what's best for us.”

This is White's fifth year with the team, and he said the blueprint for the season is pretty much set. “Every day get better, first and foremost, and the games will take care of themselves.” He's looking to their strong defence to lead the team to success, “We're always going to be a defensive-minded team — that's just our philosophy. As far as our offense goes, we have some pretty talented individual players, so we'll put that in as the year goes on, but the focus beginning to end is going to be defence.”

DeLeon agreed, “I think offence needs to be worked on, but I think the defence is going to be our main strong point.”

Heading into her second year with the girls, DeLeon's been impressed with the team's strong relationship, “Our chemistry's really good right now: it's at our highest.” Even with five new players on the team this year, the girls have established a strong bond already.

White is excited to see what the rookies have to offer, “We got a good group of rookies a good complement to the vets we've got coming back, and so far so good, everyone's getting along and working really hard.” White is extremely excited about one newcomer, “One of the incoming players, Felicia (Mazerolle), she's a transfer from Laurier, so she'll be in her third year — her first with us — and she's very talented, she'll have an impact immediately.” Mazerolle was named Most Valuable Player in the Loyalist tournament.

The team will be watching out for frontrunners Algoma, Humber, Algonquin and Seneca Colleges, and there's one team in particular that DeLeon predicted will be tough. “Algonquin's a really good team, they've won twice in a row. We gotta watch out for them for sure, but I think we can beat them.”

White is confident that the team will come out strong this year, “The approach is just to make them work as hard as they can day in and day out and inevitably we'll get better individually and collectively as a group.” The team finished first in the regular season last year, but fell short of the medal count, with a fourth place finish in the playoffs.

DeLeon has her eye on the gold, “Hopefully we do well, we go first in our division, and take gold at provincials.”

The women will play their first regular season game at Humber on October 30.