Coach Jason Longmeier says he has some big shoes on his Seymour Lady Owls basketball roster going into the 2024-25 season.

“We have to replace four pretty solid players, and two that we relied a lot on offensively to get some things done, so offensively it’s a challenge for us right now,” he said Thursday after the Lady Owls lost to Mt. Vernon (Fortville) in the annual Seymour Shootout in the Lloyd E. Scott Gymnasium.

That game concluded a busy 24 hours for the Owls as they beat New Albany in the Shootout Thursday morning after playing Indianapolis Roncalli and New Palestine Wednesday night at Shelbyville.

Longmeier said, “The fundamentals have to go a long way for us. We knew that going into this summer that we had to find a way to get multiple people to step up offensively to create opportunities to score.

“We’re a little different defensively this year. We’re not as big as the past couple years, so we must be more aggressive, and in the summer, that will be hard to do. We’re not in basketball shape right now.”

Three players who are returning that have some varsity experience include Kenzie Gagner, Emmy Munson, and Sophie Skidmore.

Gagner will be one of two seniors on the 2024-25 team, along with Greer Henry. Henry plans to play with the Lady Owls in the winter, but Longmeier said he is holding her out of the competition this summer while she recovers from surgery on her knee.

Gagner, who started one game last season, said she is increasing her role this summer. “I’m trying to be more of a primary scorer for my team, and really step up on defense because we lost four seniors last year, and now we have four incoming juniors and sophomores who didn’t really have a lot of varsity experience.

“I’m just being more of a leader this year and trying to help my team out as much as I can. We really love these summer games because they kind of prepare us for the incoming season, and it’s really good to play multiple games in one day.”

This summer, the Owls are playing on Wednesdays at Shelbyville, in a Lady Mac League in Indianapolis on Tuesdays, in the Seymour Shootout and the Hanover College Camp later in June for 18 games.

“We’ve played some pretty good competition,” Gagner said. “We played Roncalli (Wednesday night), and we felt we held our own and played pretty well. Coach knows how to get us some good competition in the summer to prepare us for the incoming season.”

Other girls playing this summer are Kelsey Hunsley, Clair Skaggs, Emmy Followell and Kennedy Burnette.

Other teams in the Shootout were Jennings County, North Harrison, Silver Creek, Bloomington South, and Charlestown.

The varsity teams played at the high school and the junior varsity teams played at Seymour Middle School, and all teams played two games.