Sports
Sioux off to solid start
Matthew Semisch
12/09/2014
Despite concerns about depth, Westhope-Newburg’s (W-N) girls’ basketball team came into this season confident that it can inflict some damage on its opponents this season.
Three games into the new campaign, the Sioux have largely been as good as they’ve advertised themselves to be.
W-N opened its 2014-15 season on Tuesday at home against Our Redeemer’s in Westhope. The Sioux seemed to punch their weight early on and took a 28-26 lead into halftime, but the deeper Knights wore W-N down in the second half en route to a 57-52 win.
Sioux head coach Jordan Cooper said that the game was reminiscent of many of W-N games from last season. The Sioux, he said, experienced many games in 2013-14 that they arguably should’ve won but didn’t.
“We’re just trying to get over that hump, and we’re so close,” Cooper said. “There were so many times in that game where we deserved to win that game, but we made some mistakes.
“We’ve got to go to work and fix some things, and it was a good team effort and a good group effort, but the girls know that they’ve got to remember how this feels going forward.
“Hopefully when we get into more tight games like this one,” he continued, “We can eke them out instead of dropping them like we did tonight.”
The senior-laden Sioux needed its eldest veterans to come up big, and they did so. Lauren Mach led W-N in scoring on Tuesday with 19 points.
W-N then bounced back well with a pair of wins at the Shootout on the Prairie tournament last weekend in Minot. The Sioux downed Kenmare 55-39 on Friday before defeating Dunseith 63-42 on Saturday.
The Sioux (2-1) will visit Glenburn on Tuesday before hosting St. John on Thursday in Newburg.