The Bison and Lady Bison basketball teams have been playing in the first round of district and have fought their way through with the new district changes made for COVID. The girls started season play before the boys since the football team was still in the playoffs until early December. Both teams faced COVID precautions, and the girls also had a new coach to adjust to. In addition, the new alignment brought Fairfield and Franklin into the district, providing new challenges.

“This year’s district is way tougher so we have to work harder than we ever have,” junior Avery Hardin said. “But we still compete in every game and practice and prepare ourselves for each opponent.”

The girls will finish their first round of district on Tuesday night against Elkhart. With tournaments off the table due to COVID, the team went into play with fewer games under their belt than usual and without knowing much about their opponents.

“With the new district we added two teams that we have never played against, so we had to just see how they played as we played them,” sophomore Alondra Dominguez said. “We watched films as much as we could whenever we had film, but we just didn’t have experience with them.”

Injuries and COVID cases have challenged the girls to keep full teams, and the JV team has missed games due to too few players.

“We lost Abby completely to a torn ACL and we have lost a few players from COVID so we have had to make a lot of changes recently,” sophomore Evana Lane said. “We have slowly gotten better at fixing these changes, and we want to come out with a bang once we get ourselves going.”

The boys started their district run against Teague and came up short but still battled their way through. The boys didn’t get a chance to play any pre-district games. They immediately bounced into district after finishing up football and so they had to get used to playing ball fast.

“Since we started late we couldn’t play a game before we started district, but we had practiced just enough to not be completely blindsided,” junior Thomas Grissett said. “We started getting our groove back recently, so now we just keep going with it and battle our way through.”

Both teams including both JV teams will play Tuesday against Elkhart. The JV teams begin at 4:30 and varsity follows.