Parker’s winter sports season started with a bang in late October. With some new additions to the coaching staff, there were high hopes for the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams.

For the girls’ team, there have been ups and downs throughout the season. For example the team won their “Blue Out” game against Senn, 45-34, but they lost to Latin twice this season. Then in  the state playoffs, which start on February 5th.

Starks said that “going into the regional tournament, they are playing well and kind of peaking at the right time,” Athletics director Bobby Starks said before that game, “So were looking forward to big things from them.”

Assistant Coach and Dean of Student Life, Chris Bielizna, was cautiously optimistic “We played a game, two low seeds, to see who would make the tournament. Now our reward for winning that game is, we are playing Marshall, and they are a real, big-time, power program. So we have got to bring our a-game, play our hardest, and hope for the best.”

This year, the Athletic Department hired a new head coach for the Girls basketball team. “We hired a new coach, Coach Alix King, who is also the Varsity Softball Coach, and she’s coached field hockey for us,” Starks said. “She was in the assistant role for us last year, and she moved up to the head varsity coach. The season for the girls’ team is going really well. Because the new head coach was the assistant coach last year, it’s running very similarly from the year previous.”

In 2014, there was not enough interest to form a girls’ Basketball team, so Paris Rosenthal, class of 2015, played on the boys’ team. Starks came the following year, and after hearing the news, wanted to make sure there would be a team for many years to come. “We have had consistency in our coaching staff, so we were happy about that, even though we had a departing coach,” Starks said. “They have done a great job of creating a culture where our girls are enjoying being there, enjoying going to practice, enjoying competing, and having fun playing basketball.”

Bielizna said, “I think that only losing two seniors and not six is going to help for years in the future, to keep building the team.”

Starks also thinks that having word spread to incoming freshmen has made a big contribution to the spike in interest in the last couple of years.

“At the beginning of the season, because the team was so small, the coaches were trying to get us to recruit people, but as the season went on, that died down,” Freshman Emma Jung said. “Freshmen do definitely make a big contribution to the team, though, because typically there are lots who want to play.”

“Being at practice was really fun,” Jung said. “I would even say that practice was more fun than the actual games, because we got to do more drills and little games rather than in games when the coaches would make us put on our game-faces and be ready to play.”

Starks sees that slowly but surely the team is getting stronger and he is thrilled that there has been a team and that they have been thriving.

The boys’ basketball team has embraced the culture that Head Coach Kevin Snider has created. According to Starks, the boys’ team has a new JV coach, but the coaching core has stayed the same, helping the team build on previous seasons.

Thankfully, there were only two major injuries, sustained by seniors Zach Lansburgh and Alex Chapman, this season. Starks thinks that the season for the boys’ team is going really well, despite their losses to rival school Latin in this year’s Blue Out games at DePaul. They start their playoff run the week of February 19.

All in all, this season has been a success according to Starks. The boys’ basketball team has a 8-13 record and took third in conference. The girls’ team has a 10-13 record so far this year.