A flu outbreak has had basketball coaches and players sidelined at North Sunflower Academy. The school shut down on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week to sanitize and clean. School resumed Thursday. The outbreak has kept Head Coach Brenda Cummins at home as well recuperating from the flu. The first two weeks of the season have been spotty with players out sick and other players yet to join the team due to the football team being in the playoffs. Coach Cummins is running simultaneous practices just to have enough bodies on the floor to work out.
“Between the three teams, we’ve yet to play with a full load,” Coach Cummins said. “We’re rescheduling our games from Monday (against Deer Creek.) We haven’t even played a game yet where I had everybody. Numbers are really low. I’ve got seven to eight persons per team.”
The JV squads are quite young with four sixth graders on the girls team and the JV boys are “very small but quick. They are going to be a lot of fun to play with. The high school girls are very inexperienced but basically we’ve got the junior high girls that moved up. I actually did play sixth graders in the high school game.”
The coach is looking forward to getting a full squad and will host Washington School on Thursday at 4:00 p.m. NSA travels to Carroll Academy on Monday and then have a break until December 2 when they travel to DeSoto Academy to start district play.
“We did play in the jamboree and played ok, we lost both. We played West Memphis and I played mostly junior high in that game and it was pretty ugly. We went to Sharkey and played and had several out,” she said. “I haven’t played with a well team or a whole team yet.”
Coach Cummins is focused on fundamentals with her JV teams and has seen them “play with a lot of heart. They are coming around. It’s going to be ok.”
Against West Memphis, the Rebels were matched up against players as tall as 6-foot, 5-inches and were dunking even in the JV game. But the Rebels “stood tall.”
“They’re not backing down. I’ve got a boy that’s about 4-foot, 10-inches tall and he wasn’t scared of them at all. He didn’t back down at all,” Coach Cummins said.
Battling the flu, football playoffs and larger opponents, the NSA Rebels and Lady Rebels basketball teams are hanging on till health and help get there.
