The Suffolk Lady Storm has won the Virginia Cities Fall Basketball League championship for the past two years, helping draw enough local interest that Suffolk is fielding two teams this fall.

The 2015 season opened on Saturday at Creekside Recreation Center, and the Lady Storm Blue edged Portsmouth 27-25, while the younger Lady Storm Green fell 18-8 to Virginia Beach 2.

This year, the league features two teams from Virginia Beach, two from Suffolk and one each from Chesapeake, Newport News, Norfolk and Portsmouth.

“We had over 30 girls come out this year to participate on our team,” said Suffolk coach Tom Lewis. “We try to keep eight teams in the league, so it worked out this year where Hampton didn’t submit a team, and I was able to keep all of the girls that came out to participate on the (Suffolk) team, and we formed two groups.”

This is the first year Suffolk has ever had two teams in the league.

There are six returning players from the Lady Storm team that won the championship last year, but they were all assigned to the Lady Storm Blue team, coached by Wayne Copeland.

Lewis, who has long coached Suffolk’s lone team in the league, decided to lead the Lady Storm Green, which is made up entirely of players who have never played in the league before. He said he made this decision because he loves to teach.

“Yeah, it was nice winning it two years in a row, but I thought I was the best guy to mold this group into a formidable team at some point,” he said. “The girls that can already play don’t need me as much, and I’ve got to learn to trust other coaches to teach them.”

The players making up Lady Storm Green struggled on Saturday, but Lewis said, “They performed better than my expectations, though. With that, I know I have a good point to start from in developing this group as a team.”

He noted the team features a lot of young talent, pointing to fifth-grader Janajah Artis and fourth-grader Shamari Davis as examples.

“If they stay with basketball, and I think they will, I think they’ll be dynamite,” he said. While they have a lot of things that need to change in the way they play, “we’ll get it corrected in practice and over the course of the games.”

Lewis said eighth-grader Amaya Hardy is probably his most experienced and most skilled player, and he has high expectations for eighth-grader Zion Johnson.

Seventh-grader McKenlee Goodloe demonstrated an aggressiveness to get to the hoop on Saturday, which Lewis said “definitely pleasantly surprised me because in practice I didn’t see that. Sometimes in the games, the lights come on.”

The Suffolk Lady Storm Green (0-1) competes against Chesapeake next Saturday at noon at the Creekside Recreation Center, while the Suffolk Lady Storm Blue (1-0) takes on Norfolk at 10 a.m.