for the tribune

Girls from Jackson County are improving their basketball skills at the Trinity Lutheran Girls Basketball Camp this week in the Bollinger Athletic Complex.

“We’re just teaching second-graders the very basic fundamentals,” said Mike Lang, Cougars varsity basketball coach and camp director.

“We’re teaching them how to dribble right and left hands, how you want your defensive stance to be, how to make a good pass, just the very basic things.”

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The camp has girls grades second through fifth from noon to 2 p.m. and sixth to eighth from 2 to 4 p.m.

One of the campers who attended was Carson Bowling, an incoming third-grader at Immanuel Lutheran School.

At the end of Monday’s session, Bowling was having fun shooting one-handed shots and said she feels comfortable shooting layups.

Lang said 22 girls are attending the camp, and the older campers will receive more in-depth instruction.

“The bigger kids we’ll start doing some more things with them, like we do our high school kids, in terms of our ball-handling drills, and some of the shooting drills, so we try to put them in the more advanced drills,” he said.

“We can do three-man weave, we do our outlet drill, our full-court drill, just some variation of things, things that we do throughout the year in our warm ups. They have fun with it. More than anything, the older kids like getting in here and interacting with the high school kids and playing with them a little bit more.”

Most of the members of the Cougars’ varsity team assisted Lang at the camp.

“The neat thing is, we’ve got kids from just about every school in town coming, so not only Immanuel and St. Ambrose, we’ve got a good variety of all the schools coming in,” Lang said.

“Our main thing is to just give them two hours of fun and entertainment and teach them a little bit about basketball.”

Emmy Munson, who will be a second-grader at Emerson School, said she attended the Seymour Owls girls’ basketball camp last week.

Munson said she wants to learn all she can about basketball and decided to also attend the Trinity camp this week.

“I just wanted to do basketball,” she said. “I just want to learn different stuff.”

Munson said she plans to spend a lot of time working on her ball-handling.

Vivian Siefker, an incoming fourth-grader at Immanuel, was in her third year attending the Trinity basketball camp, and she wants to work on all parts of her game.

She said she also participates in soccer, cross-country and softball, and basketball is her favorite sport.