THE Rockingham Flames made some significant changes to their playing style and have now added Ifunanya Ibekwe to their team that won the last two Women's SBL championships with one goal in mind.

The focus was on being able to beat the Willetton Tigers and Joondalup Wolves, and now is the time to find out if what they have done pays off.

It would have been understandable for coach Ryan Petrik, his stars Darcee Garbin and Sami Whitcomb and the rest of the dual championship winning Flames players to take their foot off the pedal thinking they had achieved enough as a group after 2015.

But that was the complete opposite to what anyone though at Rockingham. Petrik knew that it was only Whitcomb's amazing Grand Final performance that saw them claim that second championship at the expense of the Tigers.

So immediately the plans were in place of changing the playing style to be able to beat the Tigers 12 months later again without needing Whitcomb to have a remarkable individual performance.

The Lady Wolfpack team was the other one the Flames were focused on building a style and team around being able to beat, and now they are three of the four teams left in the Women's SBL.

Having finished the regular season in second place, the Flames beat the Perth Redbacks in two games in the quarter finals while the Tigers disposed of the Lakeside Lightning 2-0 to set up a Grand Final rematch in the semi finals while the Wolves take on the Perry Lakes Hawks in the other series.

Defending champions end season for Redbacks Men and Women 

Petrik has made no secret that all the Flames planning for the 2016 season has been geared around being able to take on the Tigers and Wolves at the business end of the season. And now that begins with Willetton in the semi finals and potentially Joondalup in a Grand Final if they both win through.

"Every single thing we've done all year has come back to whether or not it will help us beat Joondalup or Willetton. We know a lot of our stuff might beat Team X, but if it doesn’t beat Joondalup or Willetton we don’t want to do it," Petrik said.

"That has been the thinking all year long and clearly the pieces we've added were with Lou, Nikita Martin and Amos in mind. Certainly talking to Sam and Darcee back in January about adding Ify, we had Willetton in mind in part with that thinking.

"We knew we had to get better and we couldn’t let Sam try to do that again. We felt on paper last year we probably had the third best team but we had Sam.

"We needed to improve our talent level and that was why we looked at adding Ify. We had to ask if adding Ify was the piece we needed to beat Joondalup and Willetton, because if she wasn’t then it wasn’t relevant."

The Flames had two solid performances to beat the Redbacks in the two games of the quarter-final series. While Petrik has built his Rockingham team around not having to rely on individual brilliance, sometimes it just takes over and it was Ibekwe who starred in the Game 1 win at Mike Barnett Sports Complex and then Whitcomb in the second at Belmont Oasis Leisure Centre.

"We are trying desperately to get away from relying on that individual brilliance but the reality is that the talent is freakishly good and in our opinion they are the two best players in the league," he said.

"Ify is just in cruise control right now and when they get up and going at training, they are scary to watch. They can get us out of anything and if a team does a really good job on a scout, Sam can take on three and beat everyone. It's certainly a luxury we know we're lucky to have but we're trying to get away from it to play more five-on-five basketball."

Rockingham and Willetton opened the 2016 season with a Grand Final rematch with the Tigers beating the Flames by 29 points at Willetton Basketball Stadium, but Whitcomb, Ibekwe, Garbin and Louella Tomlinson all didn’t play that night.

But everyone was back a month ago at Rockingham and the Flames beat the Tigers by 14 points with that result securing second position for the defending champions and now home court advantage for this quarter-final series.

Petrik knew that the Flames weren’t going to be at their best until the latter part of the season because of the unavailability of players through the campaign, but he now is seeing signs that things are coming together how he envisioned.

"The last time we played Willo I got some things badly wrong and it was the first weekend we had all 10 together for the season. We had a couple of minutes with Darcee and Ify on the bench together, and it killed our defence and Lou went off," Petrik said.

"We had a patch in the second quarter where I had Sam and Jacinta off at the same time, and that killed our offence so it's simple things like that. We're trying to shorten the rotation a little bit to give girls more of a defined role of what we think will happen and how to play.

"We feel a little bit better about that but then the playbook tweaks on a daily basis. We go to training and the girls literally invent something or you see something we have to change a play for.

"That's based on the talent and they can do things they shouldn’t be able to do. We are getting there and it's a work in progress but clearly with Joondalup and Willetton left, we need it to hurry up."

While obviously not giving away the game plan ahead of the series, Petrik and the Flames will focus on shutting down one Willetton player in particular that they believe will help shut down the whole team.

That worked in the quarter finals with the Flames focusing on Rebecca Benson and it's a plan that Petrik sees no reason to not stick with.

"We try and kill the head of the snake if that makes sense so on any team we try and find one player we try to close down. It's not always the best player, but there's usually one player who if you can shut down it will kill everyone else's confidence," he said.

"We said that last year with Milo for Mandurah. She was also their best player but we knew if we could shut her down it would limit everyone else.

"Benson was that player for the Redbacks hence we put Sam onto her to try and kill her, and once her shot started missing we knew everyone else would suffer as a consequence. It's the same deal with Willetton. There's one girl we go after every time and this series will be no different."

While obviously the Flames are happy to have secured home court advantage starting with this Friday's Game 1 and then potentially Game 3 if it goes that far next weekend, it's not something Petrik expects to be a significant factor.

"I actually don’t think our team minds where we play. We are in year three of this group and we haven’t lost a final so we've played away really well when we have to, and I actually think playing away is good for us," Petrik said.

"There's a lot more pressure at home even though we've got a really good fan base in Rockingham and with the bar there on the baseline it's a great atmosphere, but we generally play better away from home. We have home court and would rather have it than not, but we're not scared of playing down the road against Willo."

Article by Chris Pike
Photo by Sebpix Photography