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Girls Basketball: Waubonsie Valley pulls away from East Aurora
Mary Beth Nolan~For Sun-Times Media
Updated: January 4, 2012 11:18PM
Waubonsie Valley’s senior leaders are asked to do many things, including avoiding a letdown after a big victory.
The No. 7 Warriors received a big three-pointer from senior Tami Morice and back-to-back layups off turnovers from fellow senior Erica Jordan in the third quarter to pull away from visiting East Aurora 38-25 in Wednesday’s Upstate Eight Valley contest.
“Coming off a three-day break and a championship, I knew we would be kind of flat,” Waubonsie Valley coach Kim Connell said. “The effort was there, but we didn’t have the greatest execution. We did enough to win.”
Waubonsie Valley (13-1, 4-1) only led 15-13 midway through the second quarter and 19-13 at halftime, but slowly worked on putting away the Tomcats.
East Aurora (8-13, 1-4) had pulled to within 21-15 on a pair of free throws from Tyshee Towner (18 points) with 4:40 left in the third quarter, but the Warriors closed out the quarter on an 8-0 run, which included Morice’s three, Jordan’s layups and a free throw from senior Becky Williford.
“I think we finally figured it was time to stop playing around and dig in deep,” Jordan said. “The halftime talk was about pushing it and not relaxing in the third quarter.”
Morice was overdue to connect from beyond the arc, having missed her first five attempts.
“She’s our best three-point shooter so I told her to keep shooting,” Connell said. “I told her she’d eventually make one and that’s all part of senior leadership.”
A three-point play from Shannon Hohman to open the fourth quarter pushed the Warriors ahead 32-15, before the Tomcats finally picked up their first field goal since the second quarter on a drive from Towner with 6:06 left. Towner had scored the Tomcats previous field goal more than 13 minutes earlier midway into the second quarter at the 4:29 mark.
“We caused some disruptions early in the game, but we didn’t sustain it throughout the whole course of the game,” East Aurora coach William Anderson said. “But Waubonsie Valley is a pretty solid team with good basketball players and their coach does a good job with them executing on both ends.”
Desiree Rhodes had five points and 10 rebounds for East Aurora.
“She was in experimental mode because we had to take some pressure off Tyshee,” Anderson said. “She did a decent job at the No. 1, had some turnovers, some decent blocks, but a couple times she didn’t look to shoot and overanalyzed a bit.”
A couple other seniors came up big for the winners as Rachael Ross led the Warriors with nine points, while Tia Brooks paced the squad with six rebounds and also chipped in with six points.
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