Photo Courtesy of Troy L. Hugen Photography

Switching from a zone to man-to-man defense this season, it has taken time for the Pella Christian girls basketball team to get comfortable on that end of the floor.

The Eagles are coming off of their best defensive outing of the year on Monday night, holding Albia to just 29 points, while forcing 22 turnovers. The defensive improvement against the Blue Demons propelled Pella Christian to their second win of the season. Pella Christian head coach Jordan Dyk said that communication and practice time have contributed to boost on that end of the floor.

“I think the big thing we talked about is communication. We’ve got to communicate. We all gotta play hard. We gotta play team defense. We’re not very tall, very long, we don’t have a rim protector, so we could do it with five, all five. And we’ve kind of slowly gotten into that. And we played a lot of zone a year ago. They’ve changed to a man system. So, it’s new for everyone. It’s not just like we’re the upper classmen have been here and played this a bunch.”

The Eagles defense will be tested Friday night, as they began the second slate of Little Hawkeye Conference play on the road against Oskaloosa, in a doubleheader that can be heard live on the KRLS2 stream at KNIAKRLS.com.