Prior to the 2017-18 season, there wasn’t a lot of talk about the Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s girls’ basketball team among the Tomahawk Conference coaches when they listed their preseason conference favorites.

After a fast start by the Knights though, that may change.

The Knights are currently 10-1 on the year, their only loss coming to Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop on December 8. Since then, the Knights have won five straight with a game Friday night at Granada-Huntley-East Chain/Truman/Martin Luther. The 10 wins this year has already surpassed last year’s record of 8-18 and the Knights haven’t even played the entire first half of the conference schedule.

The early success has been nice. But head coach Bruce Woitas, in his 29th year, isn’t too surprised to see his team playing well.

“We had a number of kids that put in some extra time in the offseason and I think that’s paying the dividends,” he said. “I think the other thing too is that [senior guard] Jody Hanson has been making everybody a better player with what she does on the basketball court. But I think we may have surprised ourselves a little bit, we thought we could be competitive and wanted to be in the upper half of the conference. We’ve played really good basketball and everyone is contributing.”

The Knights don’t really have a star player that takes over the scoring on a nightly basis. Instead, Woitas said that they have some strong leadership and a balanced squad that has quite a few scoring options and some depth.

“That’s been a nice plus, we have five girls that are averaging close to double figures in points and we’ve had several games where we’ve had five kids in double figures, it’s nice to have that too because in the past few years we’ve had to rely on one or two players,” Woitas said. “We’re led in scoring almost every night by a different player so that’s kind of a plus to have too where we can have that balance that we’ve had so far.”

Eighth-grader Madison Mathiowetz leads the team in scoring with 13.7 points per game and Cassie Heinrichs is averaging 12.4. Sydney Windschitl is scoring 12.2 per game. While those numbers are nice, Hanson has probably been the team’s most important player, Woitas said.

Hanson is averaging 8.7 ppg and her defensive presence is even more important with almost six steals per game. She has about six assists and 4.8 rebounds per game, too.

The Knights have a difficult three-game stretch coming up starting next week when they play their crosstown rivals Sleepy Eye on Tuesday. They then travel to play an improved Minnesota Valley Lutheran squad Jan. 12 and then are at Cedar Mountain/Comfrey on Jan. 16. It’s a stretch of eight straight games on the road that will test the Knights and get them ready for the playoff stretch at the end of February.

With a handful of teams remaining in the Tomahawk Conference race, it’s possible the conference title will go down to the final week. That alone should make for an interesting final month of the regular season for fans in the Tomahawk Conference region and the Knights hope they are in that race.