Haylee completed her third full season with Newberry College while younger sister Hannah has finished a frustrating first year at the university.

Issues with her knee severely curtailed Hannah’s training, though she did manage to dodge a second anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction.

Still, Hannah said she had a ball.

“I absolutely loved it. It was a lot easier than it otherwise might have been simply because I had Haylee there to help me get used to everything,” Hannah said.

“I hurt my knee again only a couple of weeks into it and at one stage the surgeon wanted to do another reconstruction.

“But after having a look at it he cleared up a lot of stuff out of that area and thinks it shouldn’t be a problem.

“Another big player in the side had hurt herself so I became the player that Haylee did a lot of her one-on-one training with. Sometimes when she wasn’t in a great mood that was pretty tough.

“But I got a greater appreciation of just how good she is. No matter what the situation is or how the rest of the team is she is so consistent.

“The other teams mark her very hard but she found a way to handle it.”

As a freshman and given her injury worries, the younger Lepaio went through through her opening season without getting a game. Haylee, though, had a season to remember.

She led the team in scoring with 18.9 points per game, led rebounds at 10.8 per game, one block per game, a team-high 0.515 in field goal shooting and was also third in free throw percentage at 0.785.

But the team wasn’t as successful as it had been in the past, bowing out in the conference semi-finals.

A handful of close losses hurt them, and even one of her best performances individually didn’t allow Lepaio to be part of a winning side when she posted 24 points and 22 rebounds in a 50-49 loss to Carson-Newman.

“Individually it was probably one of my best seasons yet and I hit a few milestones,” she said. “I hit my 1000th point since I’d been there and had a 40-point game for the first time in my career.

“My rebounding, I thought, improved and towards the back end of the year I was averaging about 15 over the last 10 games or so. I felt like that came because I was focusing a lot more on little aspects of my game – positioning and that sort of thing.

“It was a bit disappointing how the team went but we had a few players out for most of the season with injuries.”

Like Hannah, Haylee said it was noticeably easier having her sister alongside her.

“Having her there as a bit of a support was great and she could often see things that were happening in games that I couldn’t,” she said.

“She really has a head for the game and there were plenty of times where she’d come up to me after the first half and let me know that I could be doing something better or something that she noticed from the opposition.”