GRANITE CITY – Megan Sykes, a sophomore forward for the Granite City High girls basketball team, started off the new season by scoring five points in the Warriors’ 70-24 loss to Collinsville in the season curtain-raiser on Nov. 16 at Memorial Gym.
Granite worked hard, never surrendered and didn’t give up throughout the entire 32 minutes, a trademark of a Warriors’ athletic team, and it’s something the team can hang its hat on for the season opener.
“The game was definitely rough,” Sykes said during her postgame interview, “but I think we tried to give all of our effort, and at points, we were kind of down. But we brought ourselves back up and we tried our hardest.”
Megan is a Stillwater Senior Living Female Athlete of the Month for the Warriors.
Despite the odds, the Warriors kept striving, which is something the team will be doing throughout the season. It’s something that can bring positive results down the road and one never knows what could happen in a particular game.
“Yeah, I think we’ll progress through the season a lot,” Sykes said.
Sykes also thought that preseason practice went well, as Granite concentrated on one big thing throughout the workouts.
“We really just worked on defense,” Sykes said, “because defense wins games, obviously. And we just wanted to get our defense down, and we’ll go into offense and figure that out along the way.”
The team will keep on working hard in practice and Sykes and her teammates have some very ambitious, yet attainable, goals for the 2023-24 season.
“For myself, I’m going to try to drive towards the basket more,” Sykes said, “and be more confident in myself. And for the team, I think we just need to pick each other up and be all together.”
The Warriors are still planning to keep working hard so that good things can happen on the court this season, and Sykes sounded very confident in the team’s plans.
“I think we’ve got it,” Sykes said with a confident smile.
Megan is a Stillwater Senior Living Female Athlete of the Month for the Warriors.
