Coming into his first season as the head coach at Emmaus, Jeff Williams knew there were going to be some tough times. With the 22-game schedule completed and the team compiling a record of 4-12 in the EPC and 6-16 overall, things played out about how one might have been expected to go.

The young team, that featured just two seniors, neither of which had gotten much playing time in previous seasons, suffered through a streak that saw them lose nine of their last 10 games. The ironic part is that the long skid started right after an inspired win over Liberty, a team that qualified for the EPC Tournament.

"Coming into the season, I knew where our struggles would be," said Williams. "I knew that we were young and I knew that we really only had two girls [Kiyae White and Jenna Lessel] with significant varsity experience, so I knew we would struggle in that sense.

"Then, having to replace, potentially, four guards who graduated, I knew that was going to be a task because all of the girls replacing them had virtually no varsity experience at all and were freshmen and sophomores. So I knew that was going to be an area where we'd struggle."

Williams took a look behind the overall record and saw that 10 of their 16 losses were by less than 10 points and four of those losses were by less than five points. Those are the games where the inexperience of the team really showed.

"If you look back at all of the close games that we lost, it usually came down to handling the ball late in the game under pressure and in clutch situations.

"When I look at those close games," said Williams. "I look at it and say 'put us in that same situation next year and I think we come out on the other end.' This year, I felt like we were right there a bunch of times and just about to get over that hump and then, in the fourth quarter, when you're matched up against senior guards - and most of our games, that was the case - nine times out of 10, you're not going to win that matchup.

"Next year when we're put in that situation, we won't have senior guards, but we'll have experience."

Sophomore Kiyae White was recently named to the EPC First-Team All-Stars, which is a significant development. Not only is White only a sophomore, but the league added six more teams this season, giving them a total of 18 teams, but they only honored 10 players as First-Team All-Stars.

"At the beginning of the season, I told her [Kiyae] that I needed her to average 15 points and 10 rebounds as a sophomore and she definitely met that goal," said Williams. "She finished around 16 points per game and was in double digits in rebounds. The exciting thing is that she hasn't even peaked yet, so the growth that we'll see out of her from a sophomore to a junior is going to be really exciting."

The first-year coach also praised the efforts of Cayley Grabowski, Zoey Stein and Bri Hart. Williams was happy with the development of all three, even though they were seemingly thrown into tough games with little varsity experience to rely on. Williams will be meeting with each of the players this week to talk about their development and give suggestions on what needs to be done to improve their game.

"What I stressed most of all to these girls is that it's not necessarily what you do from November through February, it's how you prepare yourself from February through October," he said.

As for himself, Williams is generally happy with his performance as a varsity coach, but, like with many of his players, knows there's room for improvement.

"I wouldn't give myself much better than a C," he said. "It's a learning curve. It's different than coaching JV. It's different than coaching freshmen. You find yourself sometimes getting caught up in the moment and you should have called a timeout at a certain spot and maybe you didn't, or maybe you should have switched up a defense a little bit or not stuck with something that wasn't working quite as long. At the varsity level, you have to make changes a little bit quicker than you do at the JV or freshmen level, so that was a learning curve for myself."