Liberty County’s Metra Walthour will be entering her senior season as a Yellow Jackets basketball player at Georgia Tech and recently discussed her summer workouts, incoming freshmen and the pressure of being captain for a video on ramblinwreck.cstv.com.
Walthour, a former Liberty County High School star, spoke with G-Tech anchor Meredith Martin on Monday during the taping of “This Week in Georgia Athletics,” and said they are in the middle of summer workouts, which mean early-morning workouts four days a week.
Below are excerpts from the interview.
“We are lifting weights and doing individual workouts to develop our skills and better ourselves in order to be prepared for next season,” Walthour said.
She said the Lady Jackets also are anticipating the arrival of incoming freshmen next week.
“When they come in, we will do our best to lead them, guide them and prepare them because they are new to this and everything will be new to them,” she said. “We are going to try our best to lead them in the right direction and make things comfortable for them.”
Walthour was one of the team’s captains last season. It’s a responsibility she said comes with great pressure, especially since stars Deja Foster and Alex Montgomery both graduated.
Montgomery currently is playing for the Atlanta Dream WNBA team.
“It’s a lot of pressure to continue what they had done a great job doing,” she said. “And I’m going to try my best and do that and take what I learned from them and relay that back to the team.”
Walthour started all 35 games in her junior season and made 100 of 261 field-goal attempts. She also hit 51 treys. Walthour shot 56 percent from the free-throw line and recorded 24 rebounds, 132 assists and 81 steals.
In her sophomore season, Walthour played in 33 games with 20 starts and was 35 of 139 in field-goal attempts.
She played in 25 games with seven starts as a freshman.
Despite having a breakout season as a junior, Walthour said she continues to work hard during the offseason because she doesn’t want to become complacent.
“I’m going to continue to work hard all summer to get better because as much as I played last season, there is a lot of things I can improve on and it’s my job to improve on those things,” Walthour said. “I made a lot of mistakes so I plan to continue to work hard and not settle.”
Walthour is one of five returning seniors.
“I think our biggest accomplishment so far has been getting better every year,” she said about the senior group. “Staying together, we know each other in and out so as a whole, as the five, we are going to do our best to take the experience that we have and be able to bring the rest of the team along with us. We have to lead this team into getting better next year.”
Her former Panther and current G-Tech teammate LaQuananisha Adams also is entering her senior season. Last year she played in 34 games, starting seven of them. She was 39 of 89 in field-goal attempts. She shot 40 percent from the free-throw line and had 64 rebounds, five assists and nine steals.