Defense the focus for Seaford

Seaford girls’ basketball is having a dominant season, and it’s thanks to several moving parts, starting with the defensive side of the court.
“I think the strongest thing that we have is our defense, so no matter what, that’s what we can trust,” head coach Stephanie Bartkus said. “We can’t always trust that we’ll put the ball I the basket the same way every single night, but we definitely can stick with a lot of teams and beat teams because we don’t allow them to score.”
That’s no accident, according to Bartkus, it was a huge part of the Vikings’ game plan and mindset coming into the season.
In the team’s 56-30 win over Friends Academy last Friday, Seaford held the visitors to single digit scoring in three out of four quarters to display its dominant protection of home court. In the victory, which upped the Vikings’ record to 15-3, Amanda Williamson was on double-double watch with 8 points and 8 assists, and the stars of the show were Carey-Jean Block and Daniella Stek with 12 and 11 points, respectively. Stek also had 11 rebounds. Sophia Santella chipped in 8 points and Skylar Secondino added 6 points and a dozen boards.
With an offense that robust, you’d think it’s part of a chess match. Not exactly, but that doesn’t mean the team isn’t adaptable.

“Usually, most of our offense, we try to translate right out of our defense, but if not, we’ve just been working hard on getting our timing right and they’ve really improved,” Bartkus explained. “We’ve had this group for like two years, we had a lot of returners; unfortunately, one of our best offensive players has been hurt twice this year so we haven’t had her so we really had to make up for her in other ways. it’s kind of worked out for us because our girls are very good at keeping their head up.”
Enter the bench, with each player as imposing as the next.
“We have eight girls that can start, but you can only start five, so we have a great rotation, a strong bench,” Bartkus explained. “I can really put in a different group of girls each day and I really don’t know which one’s going to be the one that steps up, and it’s something that we love about our team.”
That wasn’t the only focus for the 2023-24 campaign.
“We put a big emphasis on we cannot start improving toward the end of the season like we did last year, it was too late by then,” Bartkus reasoned. “I think having their commitment change in the offseason, summer and fall, their improvement has been tremendous. They started off the season where they ended last year rather than having to work our way back up.”
With playoffs around the corner, it’s pretty simple.
“There’s a lot of really good teams,” Bartkus said, looking at the gauntlet of teams ahead, acknowledging that from this point forward it’s about learning from recent losses to course correct for win-or-go-home games.
The final message is clear: despite a strong defense, you have to score to come out on top.
“Playoffs is not the time to have a bad offensive day,” Bartkus said.