Lake Washington girls basketball Coach Cory Shepard has his work cut out for him.

He’s taking over a program with just six returning players that had no junior varsity team last season and that lost nine of the final 10 games of the season last year.

Those six returning players combined for 14.2 points per game last season, but Shepard said that total had more to do with the players not getting much playing time.

That won’t be a problem this year. Seniors Kate Rasmussen and Olivia Lewis will be the most important players for the Kangs this season, and each will get a healthy dose of minutes on the floor.

“It’s exciting,” Rasmussen said of her increase in playing time. “It’s just cool because I know what I can do out there and now I get a chance.”

Rasmussen leads all returning scorers with 4.6 points per game last season. The 5-foot-11 guard/forward will be a key in both scoring and leadership on the floor.

Lewis, a 5-foot-7 guard, will shoulder much of the scoring responsibility this season. She led the team with 17 points in its season-opening, 59-33 win over Highline on Dec. 2.

Junior guard Sammy Bender collected seven assists and seven steals in the Highline game and Shepard expects more of the same as the season progresses.

Shepard is emphasizing defense and blocking to help the Kangs overcome a somewhat small roster. The team will a run man-to-man defense.

On offense, Shepard said he likes to run something “that makes everybody a threat, not just one or two players.”

The biggest obstacle for the talented group will be inexperience.

“There was a group of seniors that played pretty much most of the minutes and those girls are gone,” Shepard said. “And none of these girls got to play JV because there wasn’t a team. This is a lot of these girls first time playing high school basketball.”

With 16 players this season, the Kangs will have a JV team, though six players will have to swing back and forth between JV and varsity throughout the year.

“Those are kids that should be playing full-time on varsity,” Shepard said of the six players. “But they have to play down there too to help us build the program.”

Shepard coached the boys team from 1999 to 2004, so he knows the school. He wants to take the girls team back to the heights it previously enjoyed. From 1991 to 2000, the girls team made the 4A state tournament every year except 1998 and placed six times, including second in 1999 and fourth in 2000.

The program’s drop from those years can likely be traced to coaching inconsistency. Shep-ard is the third coach for seniors like Rasmussen and Lewis.

“I don’t care how good of a coach you are,” Shepard said. “If you’re one and done or two and done, the program is going to suffer.”

That inconsistency showed up in the Kangs performance last season. The team shot out of the gates, winning 10 of its first 12 games. Then the group finished the season losing nine of 10 games, including 25- and 33-point losses in the final two games — the most lopsided losses of the season.

Rasmussen said Shepard has the perfect balance in running the program.

“You work so hard in practice,” she said. “But you walk off the court thinking that it was a lot of fun.”

Shepard said he hopes to bring consistency to the program and has hope for the future because of strong eighth- and ninth-grade players that will soon be playing at Lake Washington.

As for this season, Shepard’s goal is to take the Kangs to the district playoffs, though he acknowledged it will be quite a challenge in the tough KingCo 4A.

“There’s not a night off in this league,” Shepard said. “People probably look at us as the night off, but we’re not going to be a night off. We’re not going to be the cupcake of the schedule. That’s for sure.”

Adam McFadden can be reached at amcfadden@reporternewspapers.com or 425-255-3484, ext. 5054.