Girls basketball preview: Mead transitions from underdog to Greater Spokane League favorite

For the past couple of seasons, the Mead girls basketball team has been that scrappy, hard-working, fight tooth-and-nail for every loose ball, “don’t want to face them in the first round of districts” type of underdog.

Almost all of that remains true, as any team coached by Quantae Anderson would be – except for the “underdog” part.

Of the nine Greater Spokane League 4A/3A coaches that participated in an informal preseason poll, eight named the Panthers as the top team in the league.

The only one who did not? Anderson.

“It’s where people want to put us,” Anderson said Tuesday night after Mead downed the spring’s “East Region” champion Central Valley 56-39, Mead’s third consecutive win to start the season. “I still think that we have some really good teams out here. And so, we’re still hunting. We’re hunting CV, we’re still hunting (Gonzaga) Prep, we’re still hunting (Lewis and Clark) and all the others.

“If people want to vote us where they vote us, that’s fine. But we still know we have a lot of room to grow, and we have to continue to get better each night, each day at practice and that’s what we’re all about.”

CV beat Mead in June to culminate the truncated spring season, but the Bears graduated all five starters and their top reserve, while the Panthers bring back their entire lineup and eight total letter winners. Tuesday’s win might not have been a “passing the torch” moment, but it wasn’t insignificant either.

“It feels pretty good, especially coming in here and playing CV on their home court,” senior Olivia Moore said. “Since we lost the GSL championship last year, with the energy and the environment coming into it, we were super determined to win and we just had a chip on our shoulder knowing that we could beat them on their home court.”

Anderson has eight seniors this season, led by a pair of all-league guards: first-team pick Moore and second-teamer Alicia Suggs, both four-year starters and teammates since grade school.

Moore and Suggs were part of the seventh-seeded Panthers team that lost to No. 1 Central Valley by two points in the 2020 District 8 4A title game, then was deprived of a trip to state by second-seeded Chiawana. CV went on to win the state title.

Moore thinks her squad is primed to make a deep run this season.

“I feel like other programs have graduated a few people,” she said. “We have strong senior five and some underclassmen that are really going to contribute.”

“This year we have something to prove,” Suggs said. “We’re trying to go out there and give our all and leading the pack definitely gives us motivation to just prove something to everybody.

“People are finally realizing what a good team we actually are and how scrappy we are. And it shows.”

“It’s kind of cool because (the seniors) have been in this program for four years, right?” Anderson said. “They played since their summer of their eighth-grade year with us and they know what we expect. It’s been fun to see them mature as leaders, and then to grow as people through this whole time.”

Anderson said there’s a distinction between “people that can tell other people what to do, and people that are going to bring (others) along with them.”

“That’s one of those things as juniors they started to do,” he said. “They started to be leaders and now they’re learning to be people who lead. That’s been fun to watch as well.”

Moore and Suggs aren’t Anderson’s only weapons on the floor though. He has several players who can handle the ball, a couple of talented “bigs” and a sophomore who “brings a little bit of everything,” according to Anderson.

Teryn Gardner earned second-team All-GSL in the short spring season as a ninth-grader. According to one GSL coach, she’s the Panthers’ “X factor.”

“And it starts on the defense,” Anderson said, “and then her offensive game, that’s just changed and she’s maturing into it. She can run nonstop. She can attack the hoop. She has a nice little floater game and a nice little jump and she’s learning to shoot the ball a little further out now.”

“I know that this year is kind of my turn to step up,” Gardner said. “We each have our own role and I’m kind of finding my way.

“Each game, I just know I have to leave it all out on the court and I know everyone else will, too. If one person hustles, we know it’s easier for everyone to hustle.”

Anderson stresses a pressure defense designed to disrupt the offense, put hands into passing lanes and generate turnovers.

“(Anderson) really pushes us in practice to be as scrappy as we can be and go for every 50-50 ball and every rebound,” Suggs said. “We push each other really hard to do that, too.”

“We just try to get steals and be super-scrappy on defense and that leads to transition buckets and just better offense in general,” Moore said.

Maybe you can’t take the underdog attitude out of the Panthers regardless of ranking.