Faith Feuerbach emerging as another scoring option for Spartans

As a freshman for the Sycamore girls basketball team a season ago, Faith Feuerbach was able to sustain a complementary role to all-state sister Kylie Feuerbach, then a junior for the Spartans. She spent plenty of time on the court being a witness to her elder sister's dominance, while still being a Daily Chronicle all-area player herself in her initial high school season.

Now a sophomore, the guard is looking for her shot any time she can, and it's directly tied to a few factors.

“I feel like I’ve definitely improved, where I was last year … I wasn’t more of an all-around player. I was more of a passer," Faith Feuerbach said. "I’m trying to be more of a consistent scorer, a more consistent player.”

The younger Feuerbach's potential from beyond the 3-point arc was already known to her coaches. Following the 2018-2019 season and going into last summer, the focus on improving Faith Feuerbach's game was set on pushing her into attack mode.

“One of the things that we told her, we’re like 'listen, you’ve got to make sure that you’re staying balanced and that you are both a threat to get to the rim and a threat to shoot threes and not do just one thing,'" Sycamore coach Adam Wickness said. "We don’t want her to be one-dimensional, we want her to be multi-dimensional.”

A year removed from averaging almost seven points per game, the sophomore has ramped up her offensive aggression, scoring 13 points per game, knocking down 71 3-point field goals in 23 games and has shown an ability to get downhill toward the basket in a half-court offensive set.

Faith Feuerbach is shooting a team-best 80% (24 of 30) from the free throw line. She's third on the team in rebounds per game at 4.3 per game, with only freshman forward Evyn Carrier and her sister averaging more.

With Kylie Feuerbach playing travel ball much of last summer, Faith Feuerbach took on the go-to-scorer role for the Spartans during summer ball, where the Spartans excelled even in the future Iowa State hoopster's absence.

“She has a lot of points, so I think her being gone just forced me to step up and do more than just shoot threes," Faith Feuerbach said. "It forced me to rebound more because she gets a lot of our rebounds as well, as well as the rest of the team. It just forced me to be that extra person to do more.”

Wickness said he saw the types of steps that he told Faith Feuerbach to take.

"This summer she did a wonderful job, because we played most of this summer without Kylie, (she was) attacking the rim, and hitting the three.”

Feuerbach will look to stay in attack mode when the Spartans play DeKalb Friday in the First National Challenge at the Convocation Center in DeKalb.