As they make the transition from middle school to Sedona Red Rock High School, Grace Hafner, Jacki King, Odalis Robles and Mary Westervelt continue to develop more in common.

“They’re aggressive girls, which is great — you can teach to that,” said head coach Dave Moncibaez. “So they’re definitely going to be big assets.”

Their latest shared quality: Being undefeated through their first four games of the girls basketball summer league at SRRHS.

“Jacki has amazing speed; we’ve just got to channel it the right way for basketball,” Moncibaez added. “Mary’s getting comfortable in the system, and she and Grace really held their own.

“[Odalis] can help us out a lot on defense. She’s a good anticipator — strong with the ball.”

Only an eight-point victory over Winslow has kept the girls and their eight other teammates on the Sedona Blazin’ Nets, Moncibaez’s local girls basketball club team, from rolling to wins by margins of at least 30 points per game.

“That was nip-and-tuck, the whole time,” Moncibaez said. “We jumped on them, which surprised them, and they couldn’t get back.

“They pressed us from the beginning, and we broke it well. They got tired.”

The routs came by 40 points over Wickenburg and by 30 each over Camp Verde and Payson.

“Our main girls came up big,” Moncibaez said of his returning SRRHS front line of seniors Sophia Perry and Hannah Ringel. “Hannah’s running the court faster than ever.”

Although Camp Verde is a rebuilding team, Moncibaez was impressed by how his team was able to play a trapping,
full-court press.

“We caught them in the corner a couple of times,” he said. “We’re trying to implement more trapping when we can. Sometimes they go chase when they run right by the trap. But they’re recognizing it, releasing and stopping now.”

To stay undefeated in their home tournament, he added, his girls need a lot of work on the fundamentals of team basketball.

“As in boxing out,” he said. “Taking care of the ball.

“Come fall, we’re probably going to get into a lot more tournaments, just to get our legs going again before the season starts.

But that’s another hard thing to do because we’re a small school. A lot of these girls, if not all of them, play volleyball. It’s hit or miss.”

One of those volleyball players, Westervelt’s older sister, Liza, has left no room with anyone else to wonder who is running the show at guard.

“I put them one-on-one all the time,” Moncibaez said. “They’re definitely competitors.

“A lot of these girls don’t really know how Liza plays. Sometimes, they’ll get into that mentality of, ‘If I run, she’ll find me, so let me go get open,’ instead of trying to handle things on their own.”

It has helped that almost all of the players on the 13-girl roster have simply shown up to all but one of the practices the first two weeks.

“It’s nice to run up and down the court against one another,” Moncibaez said. “But we’ve got to get on the same page calling out plays, because a lot of our girls don’t know what means what.”

Sedona will continue to play two games every Tuesday and Thursday night through the end of June at Sedona Red Rock High School.

Moncibaez has said the team will then take July off before traveling to tournaments to be determined in August.