New Richmond – Westside head coach Jamie Lusk found himself pleased with the Renegades’ final three quarter of basketball.
Unfortunately for Lusk and Co., basketball is a four-quarter sport and the final three were largely moot after the happenings of the first.
Utilizing a relentless pressure assault, Wyoming East secured six steals in the opening quarter, rolling out to a 28-3 lead and eventually a 72-40 victory Wednesday on senior night in New Richmond.
Turnovers and an inability to advance the ball up the floor proved fatal for Westside early. East shot 11 of 22 from the field in the opening quarter including 8 of 11 inside the arc. Making matters worse was the Lady Warriors’ ability to gather their own misses.
East grabbed 10 offensive rebounds in the opening quarter and 27 on the night. The hosts won the rebounding battle 43-32 after losing it 35-29 when the two teams last met on Dec. 18.
“Since the James Monroe game when we got out-rebounded horribly, we’ve been working on it really hard in practice,” East head coach Ryan Davidson said. “The drill that we’re using is pretty nasty. I’ll be honest with you, it’s a hard drill and if you don’t rebound it and you allow your defender to get a rebound, you’re gonna be pushing a sled. Everybody. So they’ve taken that challenge and they’ve decided that we’re gonna be tough enough to do what we’re supposed to do on the glass and it’s helped. They know if they get out-rebounded, however many they get out-rebounded, they’re gonna be pushing sled.”
From the tip the Lady Warriors dominated, administering large doses of Abi Baker. The junior all-stater kicked things off with a layup, splitting a pair of free throws to make it 3-0. A pair steals led to another pair of layups, giving her a personal 7-0 run to open the game.
Kyndal Lusk joined the assault with a 3 before Karsyn Paynter broke the spell for Westside with a layup.
It was only momentary relief as Lusk fired back with consecutive 3s to push the lead to 16-2. Baker added two more layups for a 20-2 advantage and the game was never in doubt afterwards.
“I think it comes down a lot to nerves and a little bit overexcitement at times,” Coach Lusk said of the slow start. “We were excited about playing these girls and they love playing against good competition. Just sometimes we come out and we struggle in first quarters and not just tonight. It’s happened a lot this season that we come out in the first quarter and it takes us awhile to get in the flow of the game and we got to fix that. If we ever want to get to the level of these other teams in our region that are state qualifiers, we got to improve our start to games and that’s we settled down.”
Westside won the middle two quarters, outscoring East 26-24 but those efforts did little to chip into the 28-3 hole it found itself in after the first.
East’s offense largely came to a halt in the second quarter, finishing 1 of 13 from the field in the frame, which wasn’t lost on Davidson, but was also expected.
“I really wanted to do some other things so that I could get them on film and really just see what we can do well and what we can’t because we’ve been working on a lot of different stuff. It had a lot to do with that, but then the reason it got closer mainly is because I thought Westside did a good job being physical with us. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I thought they did a good job of coming after us and I think a couple of times we didn’t handle it really well. But once we calmed down, I thought we were fine.”
The night was bittersweet for the Lady Warriors. They celebrated seniors Gabby Cameron, Cadee Blackburn and Alivia Monroe who have won two titles together with the program. They also lost Baker, who suffered a head injury on a drive to the basket in the second half.
“We’ll see where she is but I don’t expect we’ll have her for our next game,” Davidson said.
Blackburn led all scorers with 16 points with Baker (15), Lusk (14) and Monroe (10) finishing in double figures as well. Monroe added 15 rebounds for a double-double.
Sarah Lilly led Westside with 12 points and 10 rebounds in the loss.
W: 3 11 13 11 – 40
WE: 28 6 18 18 – 72
Westside
Karsyn Paynter 10, Sarah Lilly 14, Kaylin Matney 5, Sydney Lusk 2, Paisley Shannon 5, Alaina Lester 2
Wyoming East
Cadee Blackburn 16, Abi Baker 15, Kyndal Lusk 14, Alivia Monroe 10, Gabby Cameron 6, Rylee Brown 7, Coley Tolliver 2
