Northmor girls surge in second half to win

By ROB HAMILTON

It was a tale of two halves when North­mor trav­eled to Card­ing­ton for a girls’ bas­ket­ball game Friday.

In the first half, Cardington’s defense sti­fled the Knights, allow­ing the Pirates to take a 16–14 lead into the half.

How­ever, in the sec­ond half, the Knights mus­tered 33 points on their way to com­ing back for a 47–34 road win.

“I’m proud of the 10 kids I had in the game,” said Knight coach John Smith. “They took care of each other and got the ball to the open per­son. I thought it was a real good team effort. I think it’s a big step for a young team to allow the game to come to them.”

The two teams played evenly for much of the first half. Both Tay­lor Shirley and Keaton Mowry scored four apiece for the Knights in the open­ing eight min­utes, but the score was tied at 9–9 thanks to bal­anced scor­ing by the Pirates. Clar­isa Lyons scored three for the Pirates, while Kait­lyn Kavan-augh, Jane Perry and Haley Foltz all added two.

The score would still be tied mid­way through the sec­ond quar­ter at 14–14, but the Knights were held score­less over the final four min­utes of the half, allow­ing the Pirates to take a two-point lead into the intermission.

Kavanaugh opened the third period with a bucket to give Card­ing­ton a four-point lead, but North­mor would come back, get­ting four straight points from Chantel Cline to tie the score.

Card­ing­ton would take their last lead of the game with 2:22 to play in the third on a put­back by Lyons that made the score 21–20, but the Knights fin­ished the quar­ter with a 7–2 run high­lighted by three free throws by Kyn­dall Williams.

Pirate coach Jodi Brown felt that her team needed to do bet­ter at mov­ing the ball offen­sively and match­ing up defen­sively — two aspects of the game that trou­bled them in the sec­ond half.

“We strug­gle with our over­all movement,” she said. “It’s some­thing we work on in prac­tice, but haven’t com­mit­ted to in games yet. We also just need to do a bet­ter job of match­ing up.”

Shirley scored five quick points in the fourth quar­ter for the Knights, as they boosted their lead to a 32–24 mar­gin. After a Lyons’ bas­ket, Williams scored five straight to give North­mor a 37–26 lead with under four min­utes to play.

While Lyons scored eight points down the stretch for Card­ing­ton, no one else on the team lit up the score­board dur­ing that time and the Knights were able to main­tain a double-digit lead until the end of the game.

Lyons led Card­ing­ton with 19, but strug­gled to get those points, scori­ing 12 in the fourth quar­ter. Both coaches noted that was a big key to the game.

“She earned her 19,” said Smith. “I don’t remem­ber her get­ting but one put­back that was easy. I was proud of the girls for not let­ting her get to the foul line and hurt­ing us there.”

Brown added, “Clar­isa has been shoot­ing 40-something per­cent for us, but she couldn’t get her nor­mal shots to fall. We didn’t play awful tonight; they just played better.”

North­mor got 13 from Shirley and 12 from Williams. Mowry added eight in the contest.

For the Knights, Smith is hop­ing his team can get a few more wins to improve their post­sea­son posi­tion­ing. The coach is hop­ing to avoid a sit­u­a­tion like last year, where they got stuck against a top seed in the very first round.

“We needed to be 8-and-something now and get to 10-and-something to avoid the Afri­centrics,” he said. “We need a cou­ple more wins to build some con­fi­dence for not just the tour­na­ment, but also our off­sea­son for next year.”

Posted by Rob Hamilton on Jan 30 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.