Bullock, Falcons looking to erase 2010 memories

A year after suffering a disappointing conclusion to an otherwise brilliant season, varsity head girls basketball coach, Scott Bullock, can't shake the heartbreak.

"I'm not sure I ever got over that one," Bullock told the Woodinville Weekly's Don Mann. "I'm not sure I ever will. You could ask Melissa (Gilkey) and Ali (Forde) and Carmen (Vasilatos) and they'd probably tell you the same thing. We don't want to experience that feeling again and that is a source of motivation for all of us."

Bullock enters his 11th season with the school after five seasons on the boys staff and two under former girls head coach Steve Segadelli where he was fortunate to be a part of Woodinville's first Kingco girls championship in 2005-06.

Last year's team was the pinnacle of three years of development for a core group of players. In Bullock's debut season as head coach, he inherited a talent depleted program that turned to several sophomores like Sarah Hale, Amanda Frost and Crystal Nybo in hopes of generating enough experience to lead to a season like last year's.

Having talented young post players like Ali Forde and Melissa Gilkey certainly didn't hurt, either.

But all that talent was not enough to get the Falcons to the state tournament. Woodinville entered the KingCo 4A playoffs ranked second in the state by the Seattle Times, but was shocked in back-to-back games by Newport and Issaquah. Just like that, the 20-3 Falcons season was over.

Now in his fourth season as the head coach of the girls basketball team at Woodinville, Bullock is focused on getting a somewhat young team to gel together quickly so that they can fulfill their potential and perhaps redeem last year's team.

While they lost key components to last year's team in seniors like Hale, Frost and Nybo,  this year's team has Star Times' 2010 female athlete of the year in Forde returning for her junior season as well as Gilkey, leading a pretty prolific post tandem.

Bullock believes that one flaw of last year's team was that it wasn't tested in a majority of their games during the regular season. So consequently, Bullock made it a point during the offseason to create an early season schedule that would test this year's team and help them come playoff time.

"We won most of our games too easily I think ... because of that we hadn't improved as much as we needed to," said Bullock.

That should not be a problem for the 2010-11 Falcons. Their challenging early season schedule has Bullock and the rest of his coaching staff hoping for a more successful conclusion to their season.

"We really like our chances to improve by the end of the year."