Tessa Lavey's return to the Bendigo Spirit has been bolstered by her role as co-captain.
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Lavey has taken on the team leadership role alongside Kelly Wilson with new recruit Carley Ernst as vice-captain.
"Moving forward as a leadership group we want to make sure we have coherency with how we talk to the girls and the messages that we send," Lavey said.
The leadership group will be able to share their experience with several young team members, such as Demi Skinner and Shyla Heal who impressed during their season debut against the Boomers.
"Shyla brings a lot of energy off the bench and when Demi came on she stepped it up with good shots," Lavey said.
Lavey as a captain brings extensive knowledge to the team with experience in the WNBL, NBL1 and as an Australian basketball representative.
Lavey was recently selected as a member of the Opals squad for a pre-Olympic qualifying tournament which will be held in Malaysia in November.
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Spirit went down to the Melbourne Boomers by 15 points on Saturday night in the opening round of the season, final scores 87-72.
"At one stage we looked up at the scoreboard and all of a sudden they were up by 20 points, we can't allow that to happen," Lavey said.
"They were able to spread really well across the floor and stretch our defence.
"Now our focus is on picking up on this early, slowing the ball down and fanning out our defence."
Spirit player Abbey Wehrung said the team was eager for this weekend's re-match.
"The beauty of sport is that we get to bounce back against the same team this week," Wehrung said.
"We've still got the emotion from the loss on the weekend and obviously we're really disappointed...defensively we knew we could've done a better job."
However, Wehrung believed the team would come back stronger than ever this weekend.
"When you lose games, your focus needs to jump straight to the next and not dwell too much on the loss," Wehrung said.
This weekend the Spirit will have a re-match against the Boomers on Saturday night at the State Basketball Centre, tip-off at 7.30pm.
On Sunday the Spirit host the Perth Lynx at the Bendigo Stadium, tip-off at 5pm.
READ MORE: Meet the 2019-20 WNBL Bendigo Spirit team
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