Basketball season in the bluegrass began with Kentucky taking down the nation’s top-ranked team on Tuesday night, and that means Clark County basketball is just around the corner.

George Rogers Clark’s girls basketball team has their first scrimmage Saturday, Nov. 16, with the first game of the regular season Dec. 3.

Coming off their third-straight region championship, the Lady Cardinals will look much different this year after losing three of their top four scorers and rebounders. But head coach Robbie Graham said the goal still remains the same.

“The region championship is always our goal,” Graham said. “We want to get the one seed, win the regular season district, the district tournament and the region tournament. Those are our three main goals each year. Is it always going to happen? No, but that’s our goal.”

The loss of last year’s senior class leaves this Cardinals team with some holes to fill, but Graham believes they will be able to do that.

“We lost some very talented young ladies. We lost four seniors who were a large percentage of our scoring and a large percentage of our rebounding. We’ve got some players who have got to step up” Graham said. “We have some young players who are talented and their roles have kind of changed this year. They’ve gone from being six or seven on the scouting report to being two or three on the scouting report, so if they can handle that, which I think they will, we’ll be pretty successful.”

Of the 13 players listed on the Lady Cardinals’ roster, seven of them are sophomores and one is a freshman.

“We’ve got some newcomers who have never been in the program and we’ve got some newcomers who have been in the program but not played a lot of varsity so there’s a difference there. Everyone’s just kind of learning the way, trying to figure it out right now,” Graham said of the youth on his team. “Roles are not defined right now so everyone’s still trying to figure it out. But our veterans are doing a really good job of helping our younger players and helping guide them as far as things on and off the court, as far as the locker room and how we do things. We’re excited about our mix of young and old.”

The “old” players on the team are the two seniors – Kennedy Igo and Shelbi Wilson.

Igo was the second-leading scorer on last year’s team with 14.1 points per game and was the team’s leader in 3-point percentage, shooting the ball at a 45.4 percent clip from behind the arc.

Wilson is the fourth-highest scorer returning for the Lady Cardinals and the third-leading returnee in rebounds from last year.

Big seasons from the two seniors will play a key role in how far the team goes in the postseason.

“They’re definitely our leaders. They’re our team captains,” Graham said of his seniors. “We tell all our underclassmen, at the end of the season, when that last game happens, you’ve gotta be able to look your seniors in the eye and tell them you gave everything you had. If you can’t do that, then we’ve got a problem.”

Following three consecutive region championships, the team is a must-watch in the community. Graham believes the community should not only come to support them for on-the-court reasons, but for what they do off the court.

“They’re terrific young ladies. They’re good students in the classroom, they’re leaders in the hallway. Our program does a lot of stuff in the community to help out different organizations because they’re good kids and they’re very caring young ladies,” Graham said. “On the court, they play hard, they compete, they’re not afraid to dive on the floor for loose balls, they’re not afraid to take charges.

“We play a physical brand of basketball and we play at a fast pace, we want to get up and down and put some points on the board and on the defensive end we’re gonna grind it out and try to keep you from scoring.”