The girls’ basketball team starts it’s playoff run Monday night at McKinney High School at 7 p.m. against Little Elm.

“I just expect it to be an exciting atmosphere with our girls fully prepared and really wanting this moment,” head coach Ross Reedy said. “One of the things that’s difficult in coaching a team that’s had a lot of people back from quite a lot of success in years past is keeping them in the moment.”

The team is under pressure as they are working to make it as far as they did last season when they lost in the state championship.

“We need to realize that you only make runs like we did last year because we stay in the moment and we focus on the task at hand,” Reedy said. “So we’re not thinking about making some deep run right now, but right now we have a one game season and we have one team on the schedule and that’s Little Elm.”

Familiar with the Lobos, the girls know they can’t look ahead.

“They are going to come out and be a good team because we’ve played them in the past and they’ve always played us pretty close,” junior Katelyn Burtch said. “They’ve always been really athletic and a tough team to play against.”

Lacking in height, the team doesn’t look like the typical basketball powerhouse and that helps fuel their fire.

“I feel like our team in general is kind of unexpected,” Burtch said. “People don’t expect you to be so good as we are, and last year we knew that we were going to have some hard games and we knew that we could get there but it wasn’t like from the beginning of the season we knew we were going to get there and it makes us want to prove people wrong.”