Charles Peters, the Bermuda Under 18 girls basketball coach, is encouraged by the progress his players made at this year’s Blue Chip Pre-Season Challenge in Manheim, Pennsylvania at the weekend.

Bermuda suffered heavy losses to New York’s Queen’s Express (64-8), Connecticut Bandits (54-27) and Fencor (36-13) in their opening three matches before chalking up their first victory against Panthers (55-31) in their fourth.

“It always takes our boys and girls teams from Bermuda a couple of games to get used to the speed and physical nature of play whenever we travel to the US,” Peters said.

“They literally beat us up court all game long. After the game our message to the team was that we are not concerned with wins and losses, as this event is designed for college coaches to evaluate players, however, we do want to see progress every single quarter of every single game going forward.

“We simply ran out of gas. Fatigue starts to play a part at the end of game when you play in these kinds of tournaments. At the end there we just couldn’t score and we allowed our opponents to dictate the tempo.”

The island’s representatives were scheduled to play their fifth and final match yesterday.

On the eve of their tournament finale, Peters said the team’s primary objective was player development rather than results on the court.

“Our mission is a little different than many of teams that attend this event,” he said.

“Our goal is to develop players that can one day play at the university and national team levels so we try to get everyone involved including all twelve of the players that we have brought with us.

“If we chose to stay with our starters in games we could have kept them all but the first one pretty close, but that would have been at the expense of giving other players valuable experience.”

The NCAA Certified tournament was attended by more than 200 college coaches who ran the rule over the participants in search of their next university prospects.

Peters, who was assisted by assistant coach Erica Woods, said that some of the college coaches have shown an interest in his players.

“More importantly than anything else, we were visited by at least ten college coaches and have received e-mails from at least seven already,” he said. “That is our mission and I’m happy to say we are achieving it.”

Peters said his players have gone from strength to strength throughout the tournament.

“I would say that the girls have improved every single game and really showed signs that we can play with any of the teams here,” he said.

“Demiqua Daniels and Inshannae Smith have been two of the best defensive players at this event and Amali Smith has been simply amazing in every game.”

Bermuda: SiYaunne Hall, Amali Smith, Demiqua Daniels, Inshan-nae Smith, Anna Gilliatt, Cydnee Todd, Kiarah Seon, Kaylee Lema, Nya Heyliger, Indya Lewis, Daelynn Richards, Zahra Wilson.