Girls Basketball: Naperville North’s big three topple West Aurora

Updated: February 2, 2012 9:51PM

Naperville North’s girls basketball team has hovered around .500 all season, but when the Huskies’ big three play well, they are a different team.

They showed that in Thursday’s 67-52 DuPage Valley Conference win over West Aurora.

Senior Shannon Bushman, junior Zoe Swift and freshman Kayla Sharples all had solid games, combining for 51 points, 24 rebounds and six steals as North held off a fourth-quarter West Aurora rally to improve to 12-12, 4-8 in the DVC, on the season.

“We look the best when Sharples, Shannon and Zoe are on,” North coach Jacquie Discipio said. “They are a tough trio to stop. We’ve had a couple of games where one or two are on or one or two are off, but when the three of them play together, that’s when we’re at our best.”

Kathleen Hahne even joined the party with 10 points for the Huskies. Those four players combined to go 14-for-14 from the free-throw line down the stretch to put the game away. That came after West (12-11, 5-7) cut the lead to 53-51 with 3:11 left on Alexis Wiggins’ runner. The Blackhawks scored only one more point the rest of the game.

For the game, the Huskies went 28 of 35 from the charity stripe.

“We’ve been working on our free throws a lot in practice,” said Bushman, who led all scorers with 20 points in the win. “We really wanted to get this win going into our last couple of games of the season and regionals. We were just focused and did a good job.”

Sharples scored nine of her 19 points in the third quarter, when Bushman’s runner from the wing staked North to a 41-25 lead mid-way through the quarter. But West slowly crept back into the game with Liz Skaggs and Abriya Zeitz able to man the post after missing considerable time due to foul trouble early in the game.

The difference showed as the Blackhawks put together an 8-0 run in the third and an 8-2 run that stretched into the fourth quarter that kept West within striking distance.

Zeitz wound up with 11 points and 12 rebounds while Alexis Nelson paced West with 14 points.

“We didn’t get it inside,” West coach Connie Siljendahl said. “We got confused when Liz was out of the game with foul trouble. We just couldn’t get ourselves back. Our two post players were in foul trouble the whole time. That was the key.”

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