Northmor defense leads them to win

By ROB HAMILTON

After only win­ning one game the entirety of last year, the North­mor Lady Knights started the 2012–13 sea­son with three straight wins.

On Thurs­day, North­mor picked up the third of those vic­to­ries by a 50–18 mar­gin over Mount Gilead. A stingy pres­sure defense held the Indi­ans to a mere two tal­lies in the first half, as the Knights opened up a com­mand­ing 28–2 lead.

“I can’t allow peo­ple to get past half court,” said Knight coach John Smith about his team’s press. “When we let up a bit, they scored. We do know we have 10 sets of legs that can go crazy.”

In each of the first two quar­ters, the Indi­ans were only able to get one free throw from Jen­nifer Brey. Com­pound­ing their offen­sive issues, the team only con­nected on two of 13 attempts from the foul line in that half.

Indian coaches Larry Leach and Lind­sey Brokaw are still work­ing to learn their team, due to an unex­pected series of events. The team’s orig­i­nal head coach, Robyn Meink­ing, resigned shortly before the sea­son started and junior var­sity coach Gerry Hart­man led the team into their first game of the sea­son before the two were hired four days before the con­test with the Knights.

“We’ve been get­ting to know the girls well,” said Leach. “We have to adjust to what they have in place. It’s not fair, what hap­pened to them, so we try to come in and make a dif­fer­ence and try to improve day by day.”

North­mor also strug­gled for much of the early going, as they only hit one field goal (by Kyn­dall Williams) and scored three points in the open­ing seven min­utes of the game.

How­ever, in the final minute of the first quar­ter, Tay­lor Shirley hit a free throw and both Shel­bie Wise­man and Shirley added field goals to give the team a 9–1 lead after eight minutes.

With the score 11–2 roughly four min­utes into the sec­ond period, North­mor got untracked offen­sively, fin­ish­ing the half on a 17–0 run. Lau­ren Bood sparked the Knights, scor­ing eight points dur­ing that time to lead them to a 28–2 advantage.

Smith noted that with the way he plays 10 girls, there is the oppor­tu­nity for any­one to step up dur­ing any one game.

“The way this group is, suc­cess breeds suc­cess,” he said. “If some­one shoots and makes it, oth­ers think they can, too. Lau­ren only played about four min­utes against Buck­eye Cen­tral (on Tues­day). With 10 kids who can play that way, you have to go with the hot hand sometimes.”

Amanda Bush scored Mount Gilead’s first field goal to open the third quar­ter, but six points by Williams helped the Knights increase their lead to a 35–4 mar­gin. They would go on to take a 41–8 lead into the fourth quar­ter. While Mount Gilead got four points from Shelby Rizor in the fourth quar­ter and outscored the Knights 10–9, they would be unable to over­come their deficit.

Bood led the Knights with 13 points, while both Shirley and Williams fin­ished with nine. Mount Gilead got four points each from Brey and Rizor.

The Indian coaches noted that their team showed a lot of heart in the game, giv­ing them some­thing to build on.

“I thought we played defense really well at times,” said Leach; while Brokaw added, “They kept their ground and worked hard.”

For Smith and the Knights, sim­ply get­ting out to a 3–0 start after last sea­son is rea­son to celebrate.

“We were 1–20 last year and hon­estly, there were lots of times we didn’t get to 20 points,” he said. “We’re still young and some expe­ri­enced teams will be able to han­dle what we do, but this is a good start.”

Posted by Rob Hamilton on Dec 5 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.