Hildreth looks to build on home win

Thunder overcame the table-toppers 85-75 on Saturday to pick up their third win of the season and climb a place to 11th. Worthing again have their sights on the top eight and a play-off place, after they reached the play-off final last year when they went on an extraordinary run, winning their final 11 league games of the season.

Hildreth said: “Obviously we want to build on this, so we’re not going to be complacent and we’re not going to be content with a win.

“I came in to today thinking that we know that our record doesn’t reflect our ability. We knew that last year but it wasn’t until we won a game that we could actually say ‘yes, that is true’. We’re in a slightly better position now, in that we won two games earlier in the season and we were so much more competitive in the first half of the season this year.

“We lost three or four games by single digits, so we knew we were more competitive. And what we’re trying to do, last year and this year, is get better each week. The run we had last year was glorified by making it to the final fours and I wouldn’t change that for the world. But we don’t want to be in a situation where it gets to the last weekend and we need to win a game to get a home play-off spot or to even make the play-offs.

“We’ll try to keep our feet on the ground and keep working hard in practice and, again, hopefully we’ll be better next Saturday than we were today.”

On a points target for a play-off spot, Hildreth said: “Everybody will know that there will be a bench mark that you’re probably going to need.

“We’re playing one game at a time, we can’t worry about what’s happening on February 28 if we’ve got a game on January 11, so we play one game at a time. We compete for that game and then, hopefully, we’ve done enough to get ourselves into a play-off spot and, even more so, a home play-off spot come the end of the season.”

Thunder travel to Reading Rockets in the league on Saturday. Their National Trophy quarter-final tie at Leeds Carnegie will take place on January 25.