Seven Lakes wants to build on last year.

The Spartans made a huge run in the playoffs last season, getting all the way to the Class A Region III Title Game and the team has brought that same mindset into this year as they try to continue their success going into this season.

Seven Lakes has started the season in strong fashion. The Spartans were undefeated heading into the Katy ISD/Cy-Fair Tournament and kept things going there, only dropping one set in their six games on Thursday and Friday to advance to the gold bracket of the tournament.

The Spartans didn’t keep those wins going on Saturday, but still played very well, taking both state finalists last year, Grand Oaks and Cinco Ranch, to the brink but falling and finishing fourth out of 48 teams at one of the toughest non-district tournaments in the entire state.

“The biggest thing these games and tournaments do is these teams expose our weaknesses and it helps us refine things and know what to go back and work on,” said Seven Lakes head coach Amy Cataline. “It’s good because it’s going to make us play better. The past two days were a lot of fun and there was a lot of winning, but today is what we are going to gain the most out of today because that’s where we will learn from.”

Seven Lakes has a young team this year, but have showed promising signs from the start of the season. The squad has continued to gain chemistry and get better together day in and day out and there were lots of great things to take from the tournament as well, with Seven Lakes beating strong teams like Cy-Fair and College Park on the way to a very strong run where they ended up in the top four of the tournament.

“It’s been surprising how well this team has clicked, it’s been great,” Cataline said. “We haven’t had many miscommunications and we haven’t had many ball drops because of it. I feel like the whole team has done a good job of unifying and playing as one group. That’s what you want to see early in the season and it’s a very positive thing to build from.”

Seven Lakes will continue to test themselves before district begins and still have Fulshear, Bridgeland and Deer Park on their schedule. That will all come before they face Cinco Ranch again in just over a week’s time to begin district and the Spartans are confident they can continue to grow.

“We have to be confident on the court, that makes the difference in some of these games against high quality teams,” Cataline said. “You could see that in opponents today, they have girls who go out there and just whale on the ball and I don’t know if we have that same confidence when we go up. That’s something that we can learn from when we play the best though, these girls are gaining that confidence and I’m confident they will get there. That’s what is fun about the early part of the season is we have so much room to grow.”