Lady Trojans junior looks forward to expanded role

Two seasons ago, the Trinity girls varsity basketball team featured a bit of a rarity for the Trojans – three freshmen on the roster. Haleigh Talbert, Trinity Oliver and Kayla Hunter all made the jump straight from eighth grade basketball.

This past season, Talbert and Oliver both started as sophomores, while Hunter saw minutes off the bench and was all-district honorable mention. This coming fall, coach Sue Cannon expects her “dynamic trio” to form the backbone of a team looking to improve on its second-place finish in District 7-6A, and one of the main things Cannon needs is for Hunter to be more selfish.

“We talked about it all spring,” Cannon explained. “We talked about the fact that she’s got to pick up the points from our [graduated] seniors. She’s got to become a more dominant threat. She’s playing well on her AAU team, so I believe that she will. I think she just need to be a little more selfish.

“We don’t want selfish players,” Cannon explained. “But I do want her to shoot more.”

With Hunter expected to join her fellow classmates in the starting lineup, Cannon is hoping Hunter can elevate her game to the next level. The coach believes all the skills are in place, and it’s time to assert them and put the “shoot” in shooting guard.

“She’s very intelligent,” Cannon said. “She plays with a lot of heart, and I love her work ethic. She has good speed and handles the ball well. She has a good shot [but] she doesn’t shoot enough. Sometimes I think when the ball is passed to her and she has a shot, she’s a very unselfish player, so she’s looking for the pass back rather than the shot. I think she needs to become more of a scoring threat.”

Hunter shot 47 percent from the field last season, which was third best on the team, but attempted far fewer shots than Cannon would prefer.

“If she shoots and misses the first one, she gets reluctant to continue to shoot,” Cannon said.

Hunter says she and Cannon have had several meetings about it, and that she understands what’s expected of her. She says she’s been focusing on those aspects of her game in skills training and summer AAU league play.

“I really want to get my scoring up and be a leader on the team,” Hunter said.

Cannon has had high expectations for Hunter since the guard made an impression playing at Central Junior High as a seventh grader.

“From the very first time I saw her, I just adored her,” Cannon said. “I talked to the coaches about her, and she was a straight-A student and very coachable. By the time she was in eighth grade playing, I knew I was going to bring her to Trinity as a ninth grader.”

Cannon also felt that way about Talbert and Oliver, and the three classmates have bonded over their experiences coming through the ranks together.

“It makes it way easier,” Hunter said of having her classmates. “We’re like a family, so anything that happens to one of us, we all come together. Having us three just makes it 10 times better.”

Now with two years of varsity play under their collective belt, this triumvirate has Cannon excited about the foreseeable future.

“I’m so looking forward to the three of them only being juniors this coming fall,” the coach said. “They improved a lot this year from last, and I expect even more improvement this coming fall.

“They’re going to have to step up,” Cannon continued. “The scoring has to increase with all three. They now are the leaders of this team. It’s their turn to be the leaders of the new kids coming up.”

For her part, Hunter says she’s comfortable with those expectations and is ready to be a leader.

“I’m hoping she now realizes those seniors are gone and last season she came off the bench and there wasn’t as much pressure,” Cannon said. “But now the pressure is there. The pressure is there for her to produce the same way her teammate who just graduated did. She’s got to pick up the slack and she can do it. She absolutely can do it. I’m not asking her to do something that she can’t.”

This story was originally published June 22, 2015 at 3:56 PM with the headline "Lady Trojans junior looks forward to expanded role."