“Intensity, Urgency, Poise”: Coach Johnson’s Lakers are Ready For Section Championship

(KDLM) – The Detroit Lakes Lakers girls basketball team is one game away from the 2022 Girls State basketball tournament. And the only thing standing in their way is the top-seeded Willmar Cardinals in the Section 8AAA Championship Game on Thursday night.

“The girls are really zoned in right now,” says head coach Rachel Johnson. “And they’re having a lot of fun right now. They’re enjoying this extra time with their peers and classmates and teachers. They’re really excited about this opportunity and understand how special it is. I told the girls at practice on Monday that there are only 16 teams still playing in Class AAA and they’re one of them and let’s make sure you are one of the eight still playing games next week.”

The Lakers beat Little Falls 39-29 in the opening round of the playoffs, then beat two-seed Alexandria 71-68 in double-overtime to advance to Thursday’s section title game.

“The game against Little Falls wasn’t pretty,” says Johnson. “But we learned a lot from that game. For a lot of these girls, it was their first playoff game so they felt the build-up and the pressure before the game. And they embraced it. And you saw that at the end of the Alexandria game, too, where a lot of our players made clutch shots and big plays and hit free throws down the stretch.”

The Lakers now face the top team in the section in the Willmar Cardinals: a team that sits at 19-8 and a perfect 8-0 against 8AAA opponents this season. The Lakers played Willmar on January 7th 54-26 in the middle of a seven-game Laker losing streak early in the season.

“We had a terrible shooting percentage the last time we saw Willmar,” says Johnson. “Not for the lack of looks. After the game, the coaching staff sat down and that could have been a time where you begin to question what we’re doing and how we’re going about this. But we sat down and looked at it and said, ‘this works’. We were getting plenty of shots off but they just weren’t falling that night. Now we’re at the point of the season where we’re finishing plays and we’re putting points up on the board.”

After a 1-7 start, the Lakers won eight of their last eleven games to finish the season and have hit their groove in the playoffs.

“We are a completely different team than Willmar saw in January,” says head coach Rachel Johnson. “What we do now compared to what we did the last time we saw them is completely different, and that’s incredibly advantageous for us. We’ve been preaching intensity, urgency, and poise to the girls this week. We are a young team, but we’ve got to act like we’ve been here before. This team has really matured a lot this season, which has been great to see. This team does all of the little things right, and that’s what it takes to win at this level.”

The Section 8AAA Championship Game will be played in Alexandria on Thursday night. The KDLM Laker Pregame Show with Charlie Newland begins at 6:40 that night, with the opening tip between the Lakers and Cardinals at 7:00.