As the playoffs approach, Oak Ridge High’s varsity girls’ basketball team is focusing on details.

The Lady Trojans are clearly the class of the Sierra Valley Conference with an 8-0 record, defeating all opponents by large, double-digit margins. As they close out their season with games at home against Christian Brothers Thursday and Cordova on Tuesday and on the road at Vista del Lago on Jan. 18, the team needs to continue to stay on task.

“In practice we’re going to continue to work on our weaknesses that have shown up in past games,” Oak Ridge coach Steve White said. “I’m going to give the girls some responsibility and have them come up with some practice plans as to what they think we need to work on too just to keep things fresh. When they take ownership and all work together it leads to good things.

“In our remaining games, we’ve got to utilize them to work on fine-tuning and executing our half-court sets on offense and be true to our defensive principles and get better at what we do. We’ll throw some new plays and sets in there to keep it fresh too.”

Oak Ridge only played one game last week, a 76-33 win over Galt. The team got off to its usual quick start, leading 26-10 after one quarter, but then struggled to find the basket in the second, scoring only six points, while the Warriors scored nine. At halftime Oak Ridge led 32-19 and White and his staff stayed away from the locker room for nearly the whole break.

“We lacked some intensity in the second quarter and I knew the girls knew what they had to do so I let them talk among themselves and figure it out,” White said. “We went in with about three minutes to go and I asked them, ‘did you fix it’ and they said ‘yes’.”

By the scoreboard, the Lady Trojans sure did fix it, as they outscored the Warriors 26-3 in the third quarter to put the game away.

“They came out with good intensity and effort and that was nice to see,” White said.

Sara James scored a game-high 29 points in the win, while Caitlin Welsch added 12. Dakota McLarnan scored seven points, while Kristen Ramona added six.