The Eastmark High School girls basketball program is in its third year, second coach, and has already surpassed the win total of the first two years combined.
Progress is clearly happening in this unique opportunity to set the foundation for the Queen Creek team, create traditions and ramp up the expectations for years to come.
The winning is starting now under coach Wayne Brimley, two seniors and a bunch of underclassmen as the Firebirds are realizing this doesn’t have to be a year of struggles because they don’t have a history of success.
It can start now.
“We’ve got a taste of winning now and we are competitive,” said senior center Mylie Stones, who is one of two players with the program from the start. “It’s a lot different than the first two years. We’ve won back-to-back games and know what it takes to be champions. We can step on the court knowing we can win. That wasn’t always the case the first two years.”
The preseason tournament was a struggle but once the regular season hit, Eastmark won six straight games heading into this week’s holiday tournament at Arizona Lutheran Prep where the Firebirds won one of their first three to sit at 7-7 overall heading into Thursday’s (Dec. 30) action.
Considering the program won a single game in its initial season under Arnecia Hawkins with six players and then played nearly all freshmen last year on the way to four wins in Brimley’s first season.
The shift in confidence and success is very palpable.
“I think it had a lot to do with our summer,” Brimley said. “Last year, we had almost all freshman as most of the girls from the first year didn’t come back. It was a COVID year, so we really didn’t get summer (2020) together to develop anything at all. Then this summer we played 30-some games together. Learned to win together and play together. It was a very important time to develop some of the chemistry we are seeing now.”
It also allowed the team to work a lot on their man-to-man defense, which has been a big part of the team’s success in the early going. The opponent averaged 28.7 points during the Firebirds six-game winning streak.
“We’re a defensive team for sure,” sophomore guard Riley Farnstrom said. “We practice it every day in practice, and we’ve showed we can slow teams down when they’re on offense. A lot of our offense comes off of our defense.”
It’s exactly the way Brimley wants the team to play as the defensive pressure leads to a transition offense that can lead to easy baskets along with a bunch of high fives on the court and the bench.
“They are doing a good job of creating offense off the defense,” he said. “Those easy baskets are huge and good defense is a strength of all good teams.”
Once the holiday tournament is over, the Firebirds will be focusing on the 3A Metro Region games as the program attempts to make a run at its first regional title, something that was out of the question the first two years.
“When I first got here (as a sophomore) I thought it would be great to be part of the program and helping it grow,” Stones said. “We are creating some traditions like going out to eat after games and we’ll have our first Senior Night. After winning some of these games now we can think about setting a standard for winning too and that standard might be pretty high by the end of the season.”
