Every winter season, Ralston Valley’s teams take to the basketball courts, ice rinks, or pools.  Year after year, RV’s teams prove again and again, that they are among the best in the state.  Arguably one of the greatest teams this year is the girl’s basketball team.

Leading the girl’s basketball team is junior, Ashley Van Sickle.  Ashley has played incredibly well this year.  She has played in all of the season’s 23 games, scoring an average of 16.3 points per game (outscoring all other players on the team).

Yet, when questioned about her accomplishments this year, she doesn’t speak highly of herself.  In fact when asked, she responded, “The best part of the season was definitely beating Lakewood.”  She doesn’t talk about her quadruple double, but instead talks of her team.  

Ashley, after all, comes from humble beginnings and she never expected to be this good in basketball.  “I started playing at the YMCA.” She stated.  “I didn’t know a whole lot about it.  I was playing soccer, but my dad really liked basketball.  I was kind of pressured into it.  But then I figured out I was pretty good at it.”

To Ashley, it’s not about what she does for her team, but what her team does to help everyone.  She believes in every single one of them, and made a point to talk about the team’s accomplishments before she even started to talk about herself.

“The quadruple double was really cool, but it wasn’t about doing it.  I was just playing my hardest for the team.”

Overall, Ashley believes the team will do extremely well during the preseason, and who can blame her?  Ralston Valley’s girls basketball team has done amazingly this year.  They’ve only lost three games out of the twenty-three game season, currently ranking them 7th in the state.

“We got a tough draw last year, but this year it looks pretty good.  I think we’ll do much better, and with a bit of luck, we might even win state this year.”

Ralston Valley’s girls basketball faces off against Loveland at RV on February 26, 2016.  Tip off at 7.