After a season cut short by a Regional loss to end the season below .500, the Manhattan High softball team now turns to new goals one practice at a time.

“Our first attempt is to try and become a better team and players every day,” coach Monty Enright said. “But we really are working hard on fundamentals of defense and offense to help give better chances to be in ballgames to win.”

The first thing Enright said he and the coaches were stressing is to be an athlete. Which culminated into a large show of players that prepared for the spring season.

“We’ve been doing conditioning, which we’ve never done before,” senior Sydney Bannister said. “So we’ve been doing a lot of core and strength building and we have a lot of young girls who are working on fundamentals right now.”

With the smaller group of juniors and sophomores, a large number of freshman now join the team to fill out the ranks.

“It’s really cool because they’re really good,” Bannister said. “It’s nice to see that people from Parks and Recreation are doing a good job of coaching the girls because they can do everything that we can.”

For its first game against Topeka High this Friday, the team worked various drills with the coaches split up to cover defensive positions and give the girls one-on-one hitting time. They stressed communication between the infield and outfield and faced having a limited number of pitchers at the start.

“We had a lot of errors last year and [we’re] keeping a positive mind though that,” senior Katelin Hoefler said.

With the new organization of coaching and conditioning the players, Enright sees the coaches able to give players more instruction on how to play defense and take different responsibilities.

“[The] first game brings its own set of fears and scares to a coach,” Enright said. “So I think that one concept has me the most concern[ed]. ‘Have we covered enough of the things that we wanted to be ready for game one?’ I don’t know if you can ever be ready for game one. But what keeps me awake at night is ‘Did I miss something that can happen during the ball game where we didn’t give any instruction?’”