Before the arrival of girls basketball coach Jodie Karsak, the Panthers struggled.

“I just think we’ve had the same girls so long, and she started a program philosophy of we’re family. We’re going to be uncommon and we’re going to get after it on defense,” senior Holly Mills said.

“Since we’re so close, we all work hard for each other and it comes together really well. We’re all friends on and off the court, so there’s just that chemistry that we want to work hard for each other and get the job done,”

The Panthers (20-1) play Blue Valley North (17-5) at 8:15 p.m. Wednesday night at Koch Arena.

The dominating win in January at Koch Arena in the City League vs. AVCTL challenge against Wichita South could prove valuable.

“South is always super duper good,” Mills said. “They have really athletic girls and Coach (Antwain) Scales, he gets them to work really hard and that’s kind of how the Kansas City schools are. So just playing that style of basketball probably helps some.”

The Panthers have gone to state the past three years, there are some things the team thinks they need to prove.

“We just hope to prove that we have improved since last year,” Mills said. “We don’t want people to think we are overrated since we got a lot of, “oh, they haven’t lost anybody and they’re 20-1.” We don’t want to show that we are overrated, we just want to prove that the hype is real.”

This time they plan to stay positive every game, not giving up till the end.

“Just not getting down on ourselves like last year when we were so down by so much with a few minutes left,” Mills said. “There were some people who were like ‘oh, man it’s over.’ But right towards the end they decided ‘hey, so what. Let’s go try and win this thing,’ and they almost pulled it off. So just staying positive and working hard the entire time.”