The Wellsville-Middletown girls basketball team couldn’t have asked a better way to start off its 2023-24 season on Nov. 21.

The Tigers came from behind to beat the Community R-6 Trojans 41-34 in their season opener at home, making it the first time since 2009 W-M defeated the Laddonia school.

“They had a big sigh of relief when the buzzer went off and they won,” W-M coach Todd Cripe said.

Now, the Tigers hope the win over Community will motivate them to turn in another successful season. W-M finished 16-11 last winter, the team’s first winning season since Cripe took over the program in 2019.

“We play game-by-game, practice-by-practice,” Cripe said. “We don’t look forward to anything. We want to be playing our best ball at the end of the year. If we can play our best ball by the end of the year, then I’ll be happy.”

The Tigers have seven returning players from last year’s team. They are seniors Bethany Slovensky, Jenelle Boeckelman and Meagan Cripe, juniors Hallie Guzy, Keigan Hall and Indica Scott and sophomore Helanea McKenzie. Slovensky is a three-time all-Eastern Missouri Conference selection.

Rounding out the team are freshmen Elly Cash and Aubrey Harmon. Both played with the W-M Junior High girls team last winter.

John Slovensky, Bethany’s father, is the Tigers’ new assistant coach.

Last winter, the Tigers won the Keytesville Tournament championship and placed fourth in the Montgomery County Invitational. Their season ended with a 56-50 loss to Community in the Class 1, District 10 finals.

Against the Trojans in their season opener, the Tigers came back from a 28-19, third-quarter deficit to pull off the victory.

“The difference in the game was they weren’t so stagnant on offense,” Cripe said. “They got stops in the second half, which helped a ton. They did a great job of switching defenses. They played three or four different defenses tonight. They did a great job of adjusting to that, knowing their roles and knowing their rotations through all of those switches and changes. It was a good win for us.”

Cripe said in order for his team to be successful, it has to do a much better job on rebounding than it did against Community R-6.

“I don’t think we rebounded very well,” he said. “We have to rebound better. We’re not going to be a dominant rebounding team, but we need to rebound better than what we did. We gave up too many offensive boards. They had probably twice as many offensive boards as we did. You can’t go into every game and expect to win and be outrebounded 2-1 on the offensive end. We were lucky to come out with the victory just based on that. But the girls are excited and that’s what it is all about.”

Hall finished with 17 points, including 13 in the second half, to lead the Tigers. Boeckelman scored seven points, followed by Guzy with six, Cash with five, Slovensky with four and McKenzie with two. Guzy scored a basket with 3:52 left in the third quarter that gave W-M a 31-30 lead it would not relinquish.

The Tigers were scheduled to play Fulton in a first-round game of the Montgomery County Invitational on Nov. 27.