No matter how good your opponents are, you never want to start a season with two straight losses.

The Emmaus girls basketball team had Boyertown and Northwestern Lehigh as its season-opening games last Friday night and Saturday afternoon, setting up a difficult test to open the year. The Hornets came through the stretch with a 1-1 record, but were energized by how they played in the two games.

Against Boyertown (1-0), Emmaus was down by 10 at halftime, but came back to tie the game by the end of the third quarter. Boyertown outscored Emmaus 23-16 in the final eight-minutes for a 49-42 win, but coach Kelsey Gallagher was proud of the battle that her team put up to come back from its halftime deficit.

With a short turnaround time, Emmaus went to Northwestern Lehigh Saturday afternoon and beat a good Northwestern team 51-46. In both games, a key for Emmaus was hitting three-point shots, knocking down eight three-pointers in both games, with freshman Keziah Brantley picking up five of the 16 three-pointers that Emmaus (1-1) hit. In fact, the game against the Lady Tigers came down to a battle of freshman players, with Brantley finishing with 17 points and Northwestern’s Paige Sevrain dropping 16 points.

“Ki is a freshman, but she doesn’t play like a freshman,” said Gallagher. “She has adjusted to the upper classmen and they’ve pulled her aside and talked to her. She wouldn’t be able to do this without the upperclassmen and having players like Alyssa Burkhart on the floor kind of frees her up a little bit.”

Brantley is comfortable with the Hornets game plan of looking to drain three-pointers since it’s something she’s worked on for a while.

“When I can, I shoot it and as long as I remember to get my feet set and use my legs, I can have some success shooting three-pointers,” said Brantley.

The game plan isn’t anything that Gallagher hasn’t been stressing since she took over the team for the 2017-2018 season, but she’s found players who can execute the game plan and is excited with what her team is showing both offensively and defensively.

“Our offense is similar to what it was last year, but we’re really focusing on getting as many touches as we can, which is then going to give us some openings on the outside,” Gallagher said. “We’ve done a good job on that with penetrating and then kicking it out and today, the shots were falling for us. We just have to keep it up. It’s super-refreshing.

“One thing we’ve worked on specifically is defense and it’s evident. We’re applying more pressure these last two games than any time in the past two-and-a-half years. It’s so nice to see the girls being rewarded and seeing that W and we just have to continue this. I always talk to my kids about getting one-percent better, come in and get better each time.”

As for Brantley, she has scored 23 points in her first two varsity games to lead the team in scoring and as Gallagher mentioned, does not look like a freshman on the court. She’s made a quick adjustment to playing varsity basketball and odds are that she’ll continue to make adjustments as the season goes along.

“I like the challenge of varsity and it’s a lot better than what I played last year, plus, I feel like our team is really good this year,” said Brantley. “The speed of the game compared to freshman is a lot faster. It’s been an adjustment, but I’m getting there.”

As for the win over Northwestern (1-2 overall, 1-0 Colonial League), it kept the team from opening the season 0-2 as they head into EPC play against Parkland and Northampton this week. Confidence-wise, there is a big difference between being winless and going into league play having gotten a win in one of their first two games. Gallagher is excited about how the team played in their first two games and believes she’s seeing things in this team that she hasn’t seen in the two previous seasons.

“This definitely was a nice win,” said Gallagher of beating Northwestern. “We’ve played two pretty good teams to start the season. Last night [Friday] we lost, but we competed and it was against a good team [Boyertown], so we could take some confidence from that and it rolled into here where we stayed within, did what we needed to do and we executed and came out on top.”