Things are looking bright in the early goings of the Corey Schneider era. The first-year ADM girls basketball head coach is off to a 2-0 start with victories over Norwalk and Van Meter through the first week of the season.

But things started off in fine fashion last season for the Tigers, who then suffered through a slump they never could quite recover from. ADM started last season 4-2, including a three-game win streak that was highlighted by a home win over eventual conference champion Ballard .

Then came a six-game losing streak that included losses to conference heavyweights Perry, Carlisle and Bondurant-Farrar. ADM rebounded with a 6-4 finish to the season, but the prolonged slump meant the Tigers would finish just 10-12.

Senior guard Emily Hoffman said she and her teammates learned from that experience and will try to use it to their advantage.

“I think what happens with us is once we lose we get our heads down and it just goes downhill from there,” she said. “Until we get that mentality of, ‘we can do this,’ the it will just continue to go downhill. So hopefully this year, if we lose, we can use that instead of making us go downhill … and I think we can.”

As Schneider put it, there is no time to feel sorry for yourself in a league like the Raccoon River Conference.

“We play in a really tough conference, so there’s going to be times where you just run into teams that are playing really well on that particular night,” he said. “We’ve just got to make sure that if we do have a bad game, we’ve got to limit it to one bad game — and we’ve got to put it aside and go onto the next one and keep our head in the game.”

Just how tough is the conference? The RRC has three teams ranked in the preseason top-15: No. 2 Carlisle, No. 5 Perry and the sixth-ranked defending champion Bombers.