By Michael O’Leary
IT Carlow Basketball Head Coach Martin Conroy is confident the Ladies Team will move up the League table and overcome their struggles so far this season.
The Ladies are away in Leixlip tomorrow(Saturday) to play the Courtyard Liffey Celtics in the Super League, and speaking to KCLR, Martin says they will be a match for anybody if they can get their full squad fully fit.
“Yeah, well we have a lot of new players in. Like from last years panel that won Division One, we only really have three or four players that stayed on this year.
“We have played really really well against top class opposition like we lost to DCU who are top of the Superleague by 4 points in DCU. We were two points up with 40 seconds to go and their experience told on the day. We just lost a Cup game last week to Galway in Galway in overtime so we are there or thereabouts.
“If we can get everybody back fit and get everybody back together, we will be ok in the 2nd half of the season, it’s just a matter of picking up one or two more results to make sure that we stay in the Superleague for next season,” he said.
Conroy also says that the Mens Squad having a panel this season will help them deal with the demands of having two games in the space of 24 hours this weekend.
“Thankfully this year, it’s a little bit easier for us because we have a panel, where last year we were reliant on 6, 7 players fulfilling all the fixtures.
This year we have got a deep bench, we are down to 12, 14 in our panel. We practice with 10 and 14 players every week so it’s not too bad.
I mean the great thing about it is that when you play double header weekends in the Mens League that nearly every team plays a double header so everybody will have played two games so tiredness does come in, fatigue comes in on the Sunday game, but our fitness levels are pretty good so we are ok, we are happy enough,” he added.