The RUMPUS basketball game is one of the most high energy environments at RUMPUS, especially against Model, one of the team’s biggest rivals. Overall, all the games at RUMPUS had positive energy and a lot of competition. The girls’ varsity game had an abundance of energy all around, from the Darlington side to the Model side. The girls played against Model in an encouraging environment, and hyped up the crowd in time for the boy’s game after. The girls’ varsity team lost 29-61.

“Against Model, the whole team communicated very well, and I thought we stayed very positive as a team even during the harder parts. I think, though, we could of definitely scored more points, and I think we have to work on our defense a little bit, and just getting stronger with the ball will help us as a team too,” sophomore Elle Howen said.

The game was very energetic with high energy and stress since these two school’s sports teams are known to have a rivalry.

“I think it was really encouraging to have a bunch of my friends there cheering me on during the game,” Howen said. “I think it really helped the team for boys and girls to have people we knew encouraging us on the sidelines and cheering us on, but we just have a lot of work to do. We need to be stronger and we need to just work better as a team, I think and that could help us win the games going forward in the season.”

One of Howen’s teammates also agreed that the environment at that game helped with everyone on the team’s energy, but there are still things to work on during the game and throughout the season.

“During the game, I feel like we worked very well together,” junior Sara Jo Pierce said. “As a whole we definitely communicated a lot, which we’ve been trying to work on in practice because that has been one of our things that we haven’t done as well. But we used a lot of zone [defense] which kind of compacted and made them not score as many baskets down low. I definitely think that we got rushed a little bit and we didn’t make as many decisions as we should have.”

Overall, the boy’s and girl’s games were very entertaining, and the student section showed out with lots of energy.

“I think that we really just need to work on playing under pressure while people are on us,” Pierce said. “The RUMPUS crowd definitely affected the playing because they were cheering us on. It was just a really big and nice environment to have everybody support. There were good and bad parts just because Model was a really hard team, so we were a little bit nervous about everybody being there, but I definitely think that we were glad that the environment was there.”