Yelm High School’s first- year head girls basketball coach Steve Miskimens has his sights set on guiding the 2024-25 Tornados to a district playoff appearance this season — though admittedly they have a lot of work to do.
The Tornados are off to a 1-3 start this season and will look to navigate through their inaugural season in the 4A South Puget Sound League. Miskimens has coached basketball for 25 years as an assistant at all different levels of competition, including boys C-Team, boys JV, girls C-Team, girls varsity and different AAU levels.
“As a first year coach, obviously I’m learning different views of the coaching and program in itself. I’ve coached from second graders all the way up to 12th grade, and I run the Yelm youth basketball program here in Yelm. I’ve done that for 25 years,” Miskimens said. “We’re kind of a low-numbers team this year. We don’t have a lot of returning players, which makes it a little difficult. There’s also some other sports going on that are conflicting a little bit. Ideally, we’d love to make districts, but we’ve got a long way to go to get there. We’re going to be working on a lot of fundamentals.”
After defeating Hockinson, 33-26, on Saturday, Nov. 30, to begin the season, the Tornados have found themselves in a three-game losing skid — including losses to Timberline, 52-48, on Monday, Dec. 2, Bonney Lake, 61-8, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, and Bethel, 82-4, on Friday, Dec. 6.
Miskimens said the team was “exposed” the last couple games on how far they have to grow to attain the team’s goal of reaching districts. Following the loss to the Bethel Bison, the coach said he and the girls talked as a team and decided they want to bear down as a program, begin taking practices more seriously and start to work harder in order to have a chance at the postseason.
“Jumping up to 4A is always going to be a challenge. The first couple of games we really got a look into what level of play is in our conference,” Miskimens said. “Bonney Lake came in here and didn’t give us any mercy whatsoever, and Bethel followed it up and just pounded us with high pressure and high intensity. It was a challenge. A lot of these girls were JV or even C-team last year, and now they’re trying to compete at a varsity 4A level.”
He said the team will apply hard-pressure situations and work on handling the ball against different defensive looks at practice. Miskimens believes his team will work hard to succeed in high-pressure, in-game situations.
“We’ve got Olympia and Spanaway Lake coming up who will be tough, and I’m sure they’ve already seen the film and are going to be all over trying to duplicate what just happened to us this past week,” Miskimens said. “The nice thing about the games against Hockinson and Timberline is we had our full team. When we have our full team, we’re going to be competitive. There’s several teams in this league that we should beat when we have our full team, and that could be enough to get us close to a playoff level.
“I did see some really good things out of the Hockinson win,” the coach continued. “The unity was starting to come together. I’m bringing in a new offensive and defensive philosophy than what they’re used to these last several years. Getting them to buy in is what I’m hoping to accomplish.”
His starting lineup for the 2024-25 season includes Mariah Arnestad, a returning varsity player that he described as being good with the basketball. It also includes Austin Hitchner, another returning varsity player who can shoot and play post or wing, and Emma Wiser, who Miskimens said carried the team in the Timberline contest with seven 3-pointers. Rounding out the lineup is Alexa Wasankari, who the coach said is going to be a big defensive contributor this season, and Kaydee Mendell, who has been working to strengthen her skills in the post.
“They’re all progressing to where we want them to be,” Miskimens said. “Hopefully we’ll get to the point where we can go in and put them all out there, start running our offense, running some plays, call out something and score with a layup. That’s where we’d like to get.”
