The Wright City girls basketball team’s goal for next week’s Hermann Invitational is simple.

“We just want to win,” Head Coach Fred Ross said.

Winning, at least on opening night, won’t be easy.

The seventh-seeded Wildcats (2-9) will face No. 2 St. Clair (8-6) Monday at 6 p.m. in the first round.

Wright City is looking for its second tournament win of the season.

The Wildcats beat Normandy, 53-2, in the seventh-place game of the Orchard Farm Tournament, but have lost six straight.

St. Clair had won two in a row heading into Tuesday’s game against Owensville.

“I know they’re big, they press pretty well and they have three good scorers,” Wright City Head Coach Fred Ross said. “They’re a well-balanced team. Seeing them last year, I’m expecting to have to deal with their size. It’s probably not a good matchup for us in the first round, but we’re going to try some things and work on our stuff, regardless of what they do.”

Ross hopes to improve his team’s press-break against St. Clair as it prepares for the rest of the tournament.

If the bracket plays true to form, the Wildcats would play No. 6 Chamois Wednesday night.

“They’ve only got one big girl, so I’m thinking we would match up pretty well with them,” Ross said. “Big girls have a tendency to hurt us, especially multiple big girls. Their press is more of a zone press, which we do typically do pretty well against. The man press is usually what we have a hard time working with. So I think we’d match up pretty well with them, and then we’d see what happens after that.”

Ross talked more about the big picture, as well.

The Wildcats get into the heart of their Eastern Missouri Conference schedule after next week’s tournament.

“I worry about our offense and the lack of continuity,” Ross said. “We’re an impatient team, and when it doesn’t work on the first or second try, we try to move away from the offense instead of running it. I was watching Hermann and Chamois last night, and Hermann runs the same flex offense that we do. But it’s not the offense, it’s the patience that they run it with. They ran it four times and got a layup because they set screens and flashed to the open area and all that.”

Ross hopes his team’s offense shows that kind of patience in Hermann, even if the Wildcats don’t return with a championship.

“We just need to win. And if we don’t win, we need to play well,” he said. “I’ve told the girls I don’t worry about the score with some of these teams, but our goal was to not have any running clocks, and we’ve had three running clocks in the last four games.”