Chaffee GBB is playing beyond its inexperience

There aren’t a lot of positives that the foes of Chaffee High School girl’s basketball can grasp onto as the MSHSAA Class 2 District 3 Tournament gets underway on Monday at Lesterville High School.

Well, there is this: The Red Devils have just one senior (Kaylynn Tuttleton) on the 2023-24 roster.

But wait, that isn’t a positive, because the young Chaffee athletes have shown that any lack of experience has not been an issue this season, particularly of late.

“For the most part,” second-year Red Devil coach Matthew Schonhoff said recently, “the majority of our team are freshmen.”

Chaffee will open its postseason on Monday at 3 p.m. at Lesterville as the No. 4 seed and will face No. 5-seed Viburnum (10-13).

On January 25th, Schonhoff’s team fell at Kelly 62-55 in the Scott-Mississippi Conference Tournament to even its record at 8-8. However, Chaffee hasn’t lost since, as it rides a seven-game win streak into the postseason.

“We made a run to state softball,” Schonhoff said of his team’s evolution through the basketball season, “so it took awhile to get their basketball legs going, and to understand how to play against 17- and 18-year-olds.

“That is a big adjustment.”

Ten of Schonhoff’s basketball players were members of the MSHSAA Class 2 Softball State Runner-up squad last fall, so these girls know how to achieve success, regardless of the sport. In addition, as Schonhoff mentioned, of his 15 basketball players, nine are in their first season of high school competition.

“It has taken a couple of months (to get going),” Schonhoff said. “We were heavily scheduled (early) with a lot of tough teams.”

Of the Red Devils’ initial 16 games, 10 were played against teams that have finished with winning records, including opening the season against Class 1 No. 2-ranked Delta and later playing the Bobcats again.

Having said that, three of those eight defeats were in single digits.

“In the beginning,” Schonhoff continued, “we took our lumps a little bit. But we grew and we have played really good basketball over the past couple of weeks.”

Chaffee has played “really good basketball” since Schonhoff arrived in town last season.

In the three seasons before Schonhoff took over the program, the Red Devils failed to have a winning season and garnered a total of 30 victories.

Over the past two years, Chaffee has had winning seasons in both years and has won a total of 32 games.

“Chaffee has great kids,” Schonhoff said, “and they work extremely hard. We fit our system to our strengths.”

A year ago, Schonhoff had eight players, so he played a different style than this season’s “system” centered on full-court defensive pressure.

Chaffee has its stingiest defense statistically, as well as its most potent offense since the program won 20 games during the 2017-18 season.

“We couldn’t press (last year),” Schonhoff said, “and we ran our offense differently. This year, we obviously have more kids. We’re faster and more athletic. We can press some more and do some different things on offense.

“We go by what our talent says, and we try to make it work.”