NORMAL, Ill.-The second team under the spotlight for the IHSA girls basketball season is the Normal Community Iron, as they get ready to tip off the 2025-2026 season.
The Iron finished last season with a record of 27-7 ending in a loss to Perkin in the playoffs. This week, we spoke with head coach David Feeney, who’s been with the Iron for 5 seasons now.
Coach Feeney spoke about the last few years, and gave us a look ahead to this season.
“We knew we were losing quite a few seniors from a really talented class. I think we had the winningest record these past 5 seasons in the school’s history. Although we now have 8 seniors, only a few of those kids played very much last year…We have an older group but we don’t necessarily have a lot of experience with playing time,” Feeney said.
Coach Feeney also said they have a lot of balance between seniors, juniors and sophomores. He said all 3 juniors and both sophomores will see significant time this season.
Feeney said that this team’s strength is that they are very unselfish. He said if they can play unselfishly and always work from “good to great”, we will see that ball go in quite a bit.
“One weakness is that every other team has some kind of horse inside or some kind of athlete(s). We don’t necessarily have the raw athlete this year, so we have to work together…That can also be our strength though because we will be much less predictable for defenders to figure out where we are going to attack,” Feeney said.
The Iron play their first game against the Normal West Wildcats. Feeney said that over the summer his team struggled a little with taking care of the ball and rebounding. He said this first game they have to spread out, be strong with the basketball and get quality rebounds.
Coach Feeney knows that this season, like any, will be a long one. We asked him how he keeps his team motivated to stay read to go at all times.
“The main thing we stress to them is joy. We want every day in our gym to be the best two hours of their day, and that really helps during the long season if it is a group you look forward to being around. It can definitely turn into a grind, so you want to play with joy, compete with joy and lose yourself in the competition”, said Feeney.
To stay up to date on IHSA basketball, follow along on wznd.com.