The Gulf Coast womens basketball team set for biggest game of the season

PANAMA CITY, Fla. (WJHG/WECP) -It is a rather big game on tap at the Arena at Northwest Florida Saturday afternoon. Coach Bart Walker and his Raiders getting set to host coach Rory Kuhn and his Commodores in the regular season finale for both. This will be the third meeting between them this season, each team winning once on its home floor. This some video of the Gulf Coast win back on the 8th. Northwest is 10-1, Gulf Coast 9-2, in terms of conference play. The Raiders are conference champs if they win. A Gulf Coast win means they’re co-champs!

“It’s a good honor because obviously it’s the greatest, best conference in the country, which we know.” coach Kuhn told us during Thursday’s practice. “It was funny, after we lost our first game to Chipola on the road, we were in the van on the way back and Ciante (Downs) was like ‘can we still win the conference championship?’ And Abbey (Cracknell) replied right away ‘yeah we’ve just got to win every game.’ And sure enough we’ve won every game. And so now we have the chance to, if we win, you know we would split the co-champs with them. And obviously in the best conference in the country that definitely means something.”

Kuhn adds this is Juco womens basketball at its highest level, and though he knows the Commodores are going up against top level competition, he says that’s the way he and his players want it.

”I think I said this before, it’s not out of the question between the conference, that we are also the best two teams in the country. So I mean the fact that we’re able to play, the bad part is that we beat up on each other. But the good part is we’re playing the best competition out there. It will be a good game, they’re really good, they’re a great team, coach Walker does a great job with them. We’ve a good successful run so far too. It will be a great game. So that’s why you play the game, that’s why you compete, conference championship on the line, on the road, it’s gonna be a good time.”

Quick correction there, they won all but one, but you get the drift. As for facing the Raiders for a third time this season, the coach put it this way, in terms of how much, if any, he changes the game plan.

”Round one’s the players round. Round two is the coaches round. Round three is the ‘war’ round. So basically just whoever wants it more. So there’s not really much different preparation, you kind of are who you are this time of the year. We know who we are and we know what we have to do to beat them. We were able to do that last time. We also know what we don’t do when we lose because they beat us. So we know what we’ve got to do, maybe just got to come out and play the game. It’s a war round, who wants it more and we’ll find out tomorrow "

That game set for 2, the men will follow with a four o’clock tipoff. Braden with the highlights Saturday night.

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