By ROBERT CHALUPNY

For the Call

Despite starting the 2011-2012 season with a 2-3 record, optimism surrounds the Oakville Senior High School girls’ basketball team.

Oakville head coach Aaron Bosch was able to extract some positives from Friday night’s 45-36 loss against Holt.

“We played good. Holt’s a good team. They’ve got two girls that are 6-2 and 6-0 — girls that are both pretty good post players,” Bosch said. “So you can’t double one of them because they’ve got two. Both of them are leading scorers.

“So we zoned them a lot, but then they’ve got a really good point guard and a really good outside shooter that were hitting threes, too. So it’s hard to play a team that’s got two good shooters and two good post players … Actually we played pretty well.

“They had a couple stretches there we actually got close … We got to within three or four and then, we’re young, we hit a stretch where our youth showed.”

After graduating all but one senior last year, scoring has been difficult for a young Oakville team early on while defense has been strong. One player who has started to emerge as a scorer is freshman Alyssa Nor-berg, who tallied 13 points Friday with nine rebounds.

“She had a pretty good game. She hit two threes … But other than her, we’ve had a hard time finding a second and third scoring option right now,” Bosch said. “That’s why we are having a hard time winning games. As an overall team, they play really hard. They move really, really well on defense. We haven’t really got blown out by anybody because I think defensively we move real well and they play really hard.”

With Friday’s matchup against Parkway Central (4-4), the Tigers will spend the week trying to develop their offense and that second scorer — and Bosch has someone in mind.

“I’m playing two freshman that are getting a lot of minutes and I’ve got two sophomores that are playing a lot of minutes and they’re just not completely comfortable yet in the offense,” he said. “Like I said, we need at least a second scorer, if not a third. We just got to keep trying to figure out what our roles are and find out who that second scorer’s gonna be. I think that Sidney Thompson can be that second scorer.”

Thompson has 24 points on the season in five games played with an average of 4.8 points per game. She is also among defensive leaders on the team with 22 rebounds — just behind Norberg, who has 29.

Bosch said he hopes to turn the page on the youth factor.

“As long as they keep playing with the effort they have been playing with, I think we can improve. Hopefully, if we can cut out those two- or three-minute spans where we look like freshmen, we can start beating some pretty decent teams here,” he said.