Watkins has Bloomfield GBB on the rise after strong season of growth

The top eight girl’s basketball squads within MSHSAA Class 3 are still alive and competing as they take the courts on Friday in the quarterfinal round of the state tournament, and Bloomfield won’t be one of them after falling in its opening postseason game of the recent Class 3 District 2 Tournament. However, there isn’t any way that an observer of the Wildcat program this season could not find it to be an immense success.

Bloomfield finished the year on a six-game win streak entering the postseason and totaled 16 victories in its 25 games.

“The difference is that these girls have bought into what (second-year Coach Emily Watkins) is selling,” second-year Wildcat Athletic Director Christopher Smith said recently. “Not only are they buying into the schemes and the practices, but they are buying into the weight room, as well.”

To put a 16-9 season into perspective, the Bloomfield program, which co-ops with Richland (Essex), only existed for eight seasons, and for three of those, the Wildcats were winless.

This season was by far the most successful in program history, after topping last year’s nine wins, which was Watkins’ first as the head coach after serving as an assistant coach for one season.

“I think it has been a lot of things,” Watkins said of building the program. “The girls are willing to come out here and work hard.”

Watkins, who played at Fontbonne College near St. Louis, has brought knowledge and expectations to the program. That attention to detail and diligence began to show signs of paying off last season.

Bloomfield entered last year having lost 31 consecutive games but opened the season with a 47-36 win over Charleston.

“Last year,” Watkins explained, “our main goal was to be competitive. The girls didn’t really know what that was.”

Not only were the Wildcat players able to learn how to succeed, but they also learned what it took to win games, which was to produce offensively.

In three of the previous seasons, Bloomfield averaged less than 20 points per game, which makes this year (14 games of scoring 53 or more points) seem astounding.

“We started to score a lot,” Watkins said of this season. “If you look at the beginning of this season, we were only getting 30, maybe 40 points a game. Then, we started scoring 60 and 70 points a game.

“We finally got girls scoring in double digits, multiple girls scoring in double digits, and I think confidence was a big key to that.”

Earlier in her tenure, Watkins didn’t have enough players to compete 5-on-5 in practice, so despite being pregnant last season, she went out and played with her athletes.

The Wildcats graduated Lauren Davis and Mollianne Dodd from this year’s group, but return nine players and will add a couple more from both the Bloomfield and Richland (Essex) eighth-grade classes.

“The girls now know what they are doing,” Watkins said. “Offensively, they have plays to run places to go, and opportunities to score.

“That is the biggest thing. Beforehand, there may have been plays, but they weren’t confident.”