A focus on fundamentals enabled the North East girls basketball team to rally for a 46-30 triumph over visiting Rising Sun Thursday night. Trailing 18-12 at intermission, the Indians dominated the second half.
"What we decided to do is we boxed out better," North East coach Chris Hadjis said. "We told the girls they needed to box out and get the rebounds. They needed to use the glass to make their layups, and they needed to come up on the trap. When we trapped them a little bit and put a little bit of pressure it caused them to rush a little bit and probably forced them to take a shot quicker than they would've liked." North East's Janiya Bibbens, who sat out much of the second quarter after picking up two early fouls, finished with a game-high 19 points. "He (Hadjis) just talked to us about getting back on defense, boxing out, talking," said Bibbens, who missed time early in the season with a sprained MCL. North East led 25-23 entering the fourth quarter. Ahead 28-27, the Indians embarked on an 11-0 run to put the game away. Jordan Longinotti (11 points) hit a pair of three-pointers in that span. Hadjis said the Indians were able to wear down the Tigers. "What plays into our hands is if we're running up and down the court, we go about 10-11 [players] deep," the coach said. "We can go 11 deep. As you can see, everybody just rotates in. And I think as the season goes on, teams are going to get tired when they start played two or three games [a week] and I think that's going to be in our advantage, not to mention we have a lot of sophomores on the team and they seem to have a little bit fresher legs." With Bibbens out of the game, Rising Sun used a 7-0 run to take a 12-9 lead midway through the second quarter. "When she's not clicking right off the bat, we like to take her out so she can think about it a little bit," Hadjis said of Bibbens. "Actually what happens is she kind of gets upset at me and then she comes in and plays a lot better." When Bibbens returned in the third quarter, the Indians took command. "Bibbens killed us," Rising Sun coach Kathy Stoudt said. "So her getting in early foul trouble [benefitted us]. We were able to put on a run and get a lead on them. They have more size than us. They killed us on the boards, absolutely killed us all game. But Bibbens got hot. We were able to contain her in the first half. She just did us in in the second half." The Indians' sophomore forward also was instrumental in helping her team bring the ball upcourt. "She was able to negate the press. She was able to distribute, and score at will there for a while," said Stoudt. "That took the air out of us and we weren't able to overcome her." Stoudt saw some positives from her team. "We had a couple nice runs there," she said. "We were able to beat their press successfully for a good part of the game. And we're still growing. We've come a long way from last year so we just want to keep getting better. I told them we just need to grow from this, not dwell on it. Just look inward at ourselves and try to get better." Comments are closed.
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