Well, the girls suffered their second loss of the season to a strong Sioux City North team on Saturday. We were missing Maura, which made a difference. And because coach and the newspapers won't say it, I will - the refs were not great. They were bad the first half. Well, it was really mostly one guy. When I say bad, I mean really one-sided. In the second half, they made some ridiculous calls, too, but they also let some stuff go - and it was on both sides.
Regardless of the refs, we would have lost the game. Sioux City North shot 60% in the first half (50% 3-pt shooting), and 58% for the game. They missed almost nothing. And they made all their free-throw attempts - or 88% (which when the refs are calling a lot against us, sends them to the line a lot more). And we did not respond as a team well to their press, or to their offense.
The bright side - if there is one in a loss - would be that Kionna played phenomenally well. She had 23 points, was 10 for 11 field goal shooting, hit 3-5 of her freethrows (could have done better there), had 2 blocks and 4 steals, and had 7 rebounds (and when they don't miss shots, or fouls are called everytime they miss a shot, it is hard to get a rebound...) And on top of that, she made their all-state girl, Jalyssa Ceasar, look relatively unimpressive. Ceasar had 11 points and fouled out, and only one bucket was with Kionna guarding her.
The team did not, unfortunately, have any answer for their guards. One of their guards had a career night, hitting five three pointers and making all of her free throw attempts to get 23 points. And they were pretty deep, so it was a struggle.
Trisha scored 20 points for us, and Cheyenne had 11 (so between Kionna, Trish, and Chey we had 54 of our 59 points). And we still lost by 20. We were not great from the freethrow line, which has been a strength of ours all season. But again - even if we were 100%, we would not have won that game. It was a good lesson to have now. Everyone will need to work hard and not take these last three games of the regular season for granted.
The girls play Indianola on Tuesday, Fort Dodge on Thursday, and Mason City at Mason City on Friday. And Regional play starts next week!
The link to the article in the Ames Trib:
http://www.amestrib.com/articles/2009/02/08/ames_tribune/sports/doc498e742bd7cf4986740607.txt
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