Basketball: Minot girls enter new season with sky-high expectations
Minot Girls Basketball enters the season as the top team in the Class AA basketball poll, and the Majettes duo of stellar sophomores are back to lead the way.
Winning a state tournament title in 2022 and the WDA tournament in 2023 has raised the bar for Minot Girls Basketball, as the Majettes return two of the states top players in guard Maggie Fricke, and forward Leelee Bell.
“You’ve got to keep working, you should never be thinking you’re too high or you’ve got it done, you always want to push to be better and better and pushing one another and it doesn’t matter if you’re on the bench, you help us. If you start, you help us, every single person helps us,” Fricke said.
“The expectations are really high, but we’ve just got to know that we’ve got to keep the standards up and play as hard as we can because we know everyone probably has an eye on us, so we just know we’ve got to keep working hard and keep the expectations up,” Bell said.
Bells’ talent and contribution to a winning culture made for an eventful offseason with a laundry list of college offers for the 6’2 sophomore from schools like Louisville, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Oklahoma among many others.
“It was crazy, it’s like, I don’t even know what to, I’m at a loss for words. I’m very thankful and I just know that a lot of people are going to have an eye on me, so I’ve just got to keep working hard,” Bell said.
While Bell and Fricke are set to lead the way, the rest of the lineup is filled with players stepping in to bigger varsity roles on a team with less size 1-5 than last season.
“We have a small team, but we have a lot of skill on our team and knowing that we can use everyone on our bench is gonna be big for us this year,” Senior Guard Presley Bennett said.
“Yes, we have a smaller team but we have great talent and it doesn’t matter how small, big, whatever. You’ve just got to use your talent and we work so hard and at the end of the game, it’s who works harder at end so I think we can do that,” Fricke said.
Despite a loss in the opening round at state back in March, the team took valuable lessons on how to win postseason games.
“We learned that we just need to play a regular game. I think we overthought it a lot and just looking back, we can see what we can do better,” Fricke said.
The Majettes can put the state on notice in their first three games of the season, playing West Fargo, West Fargo Sheyenne, and the team that beat them in the quarterfinals, Grand Forks Red River at home.
