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Girls Basketball: Waubonsie Valley proves too much for South Elgin
| Andrew A. Nelles~For Sun-Times Media |
Updated: January 10, 2012 10:18PM
Becky Williford, Rachael Ross, Gratia Brooks, and the rest of Waubonsie Valley’s girls basketball players passed their history exam Tuesday with flying colors.
A year ago they beat South Elgin by 40 points, then turned around in the rematch and lost by 15 at South Elgin. Reminded of it at least a few times in practice this week after they had won the first matchup this season by 13, the Warriors responded and destroyed South Elgin on its own floor Tuesday 62-36 in Upstate Eight Valley play.
“We talked about how last year we played them at home and beat them by (40) and then came here on a Saturday afternoon and laid a big, old egg,” Waubonsie Valley coach Kim Connell said. “South Elgin is a good enough team where if we came out here and laid an egg, they’d beat us.
“So we (coaches) made them fully aware of it.”
Williford found her taller players inside for easy buckets with six assists for the game, and those taller teammates hit the boards hard and dominated inside against the smaller Storm.
“We knew they might come out in a 1-3-1 because they played us in it last time,” said Williford, who added 10 points to her flashy passing. “When we attacked it from the middle, it opened up more views for the posts and the posts were finishing shots.”
Ross, Waubonsie Valley’s 6-foot-3 senior post player, had 14 points and 10 rebounds while Brooks, a 5-10 junior, scored a team-high 19 points and pulled down 14 rebounds. Tami Morice added 12 points for the Warriors (14-1, 5-1), who won their seventh straight.
“(Williford) has great court vision,” Connell said. “She did a great job of distributing the ball. The nice thing about Becky is she can score, as well.”
Already leading 17-10 after a quarter, the Warriors turned it into a rout by shutting out South Elgin for the first 4:22 of the second quarter. They outscored the Storm 14-3 in the second quarter for a 31-13 halftime lead, and padded it with a 16-7 third quarter.
South Elgin’s Loyola-bound guard Becca Smith scored a team-high 19 points, but was silenced for a big part of the game by a Warriors defense that prevented her from driving the lane. She hit two first-quarter three-pointers and two free throws, then didn’t score another point until 5:33 remained in the contest.
“We did a lot of switching and said we’d rather give up some of her threes than have her beat us going to the basket,” Connell said.
Waubonsie Valley owned a 40-25 rebounding edge over South Elgin (12-8, 2-6), hit 50 percent from the floor (25-of-50) and held the Storm to below 20 percent shooting from the floor (10-of-51). South Elgin had only three first-half field goals and no one besides Smith scored in double figures. Savanah Uveges had nine points for the Storm.
“All I can say is we’re just going to start all over tomorrow,” said South Elgin coach Tim Prendergast. “We don’t match up with them physically and we’re smaller, so I don’t know. They killed us on the glass for the second time this year. There was no resistance. I know we’re small, but you can still fight through that.
“And then we didn’t shoot the ball well.”
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