Last season, the Skyline girls basketball team won just three games and closed the season with 15 straight losses. Just five games into this season however, the Eagles (3-2) have matched that win total from a season ago after defeating Father Gabriel Richard 55-46 Friday night at Skyline High School.

“This team, they love to practice and whatever we work on in practice, they try to do. It might not always work, but they try it,” said Skyline head coach Keith Wade. “We knew that against their defense we needed to spread them out and use our quickness and allow our shooters to get open looks.”

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Those shooters included senior Janae Sims who led all scorers with 15 points. Sims scored the first seven points of the game for the Eagles and 10 points in the first quarter alone.

“She is playing out of her mind right now. She’s playing the way a senior should be playing. She’s playing like a senior that doesn’t want to lose,” Wasde said. “She tells me everyday ‘coach I hate losing, we’ve got to win this year’ and she is coming out and doing what she is supposed to do and I couldn’t be any more proud of her.”

Skyline used a 10-2 run at the end of the first quarter to jump out to 19-11 lead after one quarter.

The Irish were able to cut the lead to four early in the second, but could not get any closer throughout the rest of the contest. Head coach Matt Carroll couldn’t point just one reason why his team struggled.

“It goes all around. When you lose the way we lost this game, everybody takes a share of the blame,” Carroll said.

He did admit that the aggressiveness of Skyline caused problems for his team all night on both sides of the ball.

“In order for us to have any success this year, we have to put pressure on the opponent for 32 minutes and they did a good job of not backing off just because (Richard) broke the press,” Wade said.

Emily Hogan led the way for the Irish (1-2) with 11 points, including four points in the first 45 seconds of the second half to once again cut her team’s deficit to four. The Eagles responded with an 11-3 run before eventually pushing the lead to 16 at one point.

With the win Skyline is once again over the .500 mark, but is still looking for it’s first league win in program history. The Eagles will get that chance on Tuesday when they face Pioneer at 7 p.m. For Wade and his team getting on a roll is important, especially for a team no longer content with moral victories.

“We talk about not being satisfied to be in the game in the fourth quarter, because there weren’t many last year that we were in the game. Be mad if we don’t win. Be satisfied only with a win,” Wade said.