Highland’s defense leads them past Lady Indians

By ROB HAMILTON

Enter­ing this sea­son, the High­land Lady Scots weren’t par­tic­u­larly expe­ri­enced at the var­sity level.

Los­ing senior Heather Thacker (an All-Mid-Ohio Ath­letic Con­fer­ence pick) to injury recently def­i­nitely didn’t help the team in regards to that lack of expe­ri­ence, so head coach Galen Chap­man was look­ing for some­thing to pro­vide a pos­i­tive spark for his players.

In the form of a good defen­sive show­ing, Chap­man might have got­ten that spark on Fri­day, Dec. 21 at Mount Gilead. The Scots held the Indi­ans to under five points in each of the open­ing three quar­ters, as they claimed a 36–24 victory.

“We’ve been strug­gling a bit,” said the coach. “But the one thing I keep stress­ing is to work hard It’s kind of nice to have them play hard and build their con­fi­dence a bit with­out Heather. It’s good for morale.”

While the Scots weren’t par­tic­u­larly sharp from the field against the Indi­ans, they were able to sti­fle the MG offense in the con­test. In the first quar­ter, the home team was only able to hit one shot from the field — a three-pointer by Christin Sweeney. That shot scored all but one of the team’s four first-quarter points, as High­land opened up a 10–4 advantage.

Both Abby Gar­cia and Katie Davies drained threes of their own for the Scots in the early going to help stake their team to the early lead.

After a bas­ket by Lexi Win­kle­foos opened the sec­ond quar­ter, Mount Gilead responded with a bas­ket and free throw by Sweeney to close within a 12–7 mar­gin. Unfor­tu­nately for the Indi­ans, those three points would be the only ones they scored in the period.

High­land would fire back with another bas­ket by Win­kle­foos and a shot from Nic­hole Carter to open up a 16–7 lead at the half.

Kayla Davies would then boost the team in the early stages of the third quar­ter, get­ting a three-pointer and a shot from fur­ther inside to help the Scots take a 21–9 lead. After Jen­nifer Brey gave the Indi­ans two points on a steal and lay-up, High­land then got back-to-back bas­kets by Win­kle­foos to boost their lead to a 25–11 margin.

Chap­man was pleased that so many play­ers on his team stepped up to hit shots at dif­fer­ent times. While the team only scored 36 points, six dif­fer­ent play­ers con­tributed offen­sively — some­thing he feels is impor­tant with a young team.

“Part of being young is that you’re going to make a cou­ple and then miss a cou­ple,” he said. “I need every­one to keep their heads up and keep plug­ging away.”

The Indi­ans would bat­tle back in the fourth quar­ter to get within sin­gle dig­its. Trail­ing 27–13, the Indi­ans went on an 8–2 run high­lighted by three-pointers from both Bai­ley Gompf and Sweeney.

High­land would get two points from Addie Franklin, but the Indi­ans got another three from Gompf to close within a 31–24 mar­gin with 1:31 to play.

Mount Gilead would get the ball back with the chance to whit­tle more points off their deficit, but the Scots got a steal from Gar­cia, who scored to get the High­land lead back up to nine points.

The Indi­ans then missed a pair of free throws on their next trip down the floor and High­land would be able to ice the game from the foul line, hit­ting three over the game’s final 37 seconds.

Mount Gilead’s Sweeney led all scor­ers with 11 points, while Win­kle­foos paced the Scots with 10 and Katie Davies added eight.

Chap­man was pleased with the win, not­ing that while his team has a lot of things to work on, most of those issues are based in their inexperience.

“It’s just work­ing on the lit­tle things,” he said. “It’s just learn­ing those ‘in-the-game’ things when you’re young and you can always make up for that with hard work.”

Posted by Rob Hamilton on Jan 1 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.