NEESES - Shalika Smalls has had a sour taste in her mouth for quite some time now.

The Hunter-Kinard-Tyler Lady Trojans guard has constantly thought about that fateful day when she and her team walked out of the Colonial Center without the one thing they worked so hard for — the Class A girls championship trophy. It was the last game she played and the first order of business to discuss this season.

“That’s what we talked about the first day of practice,” Hunter-Kinard-Tyler head coach Jarvis Davis said. “All we talked about was coming up short and the things we did wrong in that game.”

Nine months later, that memory lingers on for Smalls. In fact, it lingers on for each of the returning Lady Trojans. It is that memory that has pushed her and her teammates to work even harder.

“Yeah, I know I was in foul trouble,” Smalls recalled, “but I look at that and say I’ve got to play harder and I’m playing harder and harder every game.”

Smalls opened her season with a bang. The senior guard dropped 49 points against Swansea. As a following act, she tallied 31 points a day later against Denmark-Olar. Even though last year’s T&D Female Athlete of the Year is currently averaging 40 points in two games, there’s something different that stands out about her.

“She’s very unselfish,” Davis said. “That’s one thing I had to tell her. In the Swansea game, she was being a little too unselfish. She was passing more than she was shooting and we were making turnovers just because we were passing the ball too much.”

Smalls attributes her unselfish play to her teammates and their willingness to step up.

“I see that my teammates want the ball more than they wanted it last year,” Smalls said. “So, I try to throw the ball. Everybody wants the ball now.”

With Smalls seeing the court better than she’s ever seen it before and her teammates getting more involved, Davis believes that Smalls’ thought process as a basketball player has increased tremendously.

“It’s a lot better,” Davis said. “There’s a lot of things that she’s had to work on as far as fundamentals. Now’s she’s taken it more seriously. She would do things like go behind her back between two people. Now, she doesn’t do that. Now, she takes her time and she sees the floor better and she just understands that if you get your teammates involved, you’ll get your shots. I told her that once she learned that, that’ll take the pressure off of her and those points will come easier.”

The Lady Trojans were named Class A’s preseason number one and that’s not an honor they take lightly. Still, the one thing that matters most to them is a state title.

“Being ranked number one is a great honor,” Davis said, “but I tell (the girls) that it doesn’t mean anything if, at the end of the year, you didn’t win. So, I tell them to go ahead and accept the honor we’ve got. I tell them that everybody is going to shoot for us and try to beat us. That’s why we’ve increased our intensity in practice. We want to increase it in the game. I tell them the only way you’re going to keep it is if you work hard and that’s what they’ve been doing.”

T&D Sports Writer Emery Glover can be reached by e-mail at eglover@timesanddemocrat.com or by phone at 803-533-5532. Check out his blog, Cover 2, at www.TheTandD.com.

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