Sports
Beat-up Sioux survive
Matthew Semisch
12/16/2014
It’s not unusual for sports teams to say they need a break halfway through or into the second half of their seasons. What’s rarer is when it’s needed much earlier on.
Right now, Westhope-Newburg’s (W-N) girls’ basketball is proving to be one of those seldom-seen cases.
The good news for the Sioux regarding their first four games of the new season is that they won three of them.
The bad news is that W-N lost senior center Lauren Mach to a season-ending injury in the Dec. 5 game against Kenmare in Minot. A torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) will see her out for the rest of the basketball season and likely all of the upcoming softball season with Westhope-Newburg-Bottineau (W-N-B).
As for the Sioux girls’ basketball team, it downed both Kenmare and Dunseith two weekends ago in Minot, and a third consecutive victory came last Tuesday in Glenburn.
It didn’t come easy, but W-N pulled out a 57-54 win over the Panthers on Glenburn’s home court. Senior forward Molly Lodoen led the Sioux with 27 points as well as 16 rebounds, nine steals and a pair of assists.
Another W-N senior, forward Amber Hall, also played a key role in the win. Against Glenburn, Hall scored 10 points, hauled down six rebounds and picked up four steals and as many assists.
Some 70 hours later, Hall rescued her team in its home opener against St. John.
W-N led the Woodchucks 30-13 at halftime in Newburg. However, after St. John scored 26 points in the third quarter, Hall put the Chucks to bed in the fourth.
She opened the game’s final quarter with seven unanswered points, the last of which capped off a 27-point performance on the night. She also posted seven rebounds and five assists against the Chucks.
“Amber played really tough and really hard and scored some really big points for us,” W-N head coach Jordan Cooper said. “She stopped the bleeding in the fourth quarter, really.
“She proved tonight that she’s a great two-way player, and she came up with some big steals and made some big shots. That’s great to see this early in the season, and that’s going to really help her confidence as we keep going forward.”
Hall said that, before the Sioux’s fourth-quarter surge, there had been a feeling that the win was slipping away.
“I feel like we came out at the start of the second half feeling like we had the game in hand,” she said. “After halftime, we came out kind of flat, and that wasn’t good.
“We had to step up a little bit, calm down and just get our heads back into the game and into our normal, fast-paced basketball game.
“I was getting nervous there in the third, and I think we all felt like that,” Hall continued. “It felt like itwas slipping away, but we got to a point where we knew we had to pull ourselves up.”
The Sioux will be back in action tonight at home against Mohall-Lansford-Sherwood (M-L-S). The game is set to start at 5:45 p.m. in Westhope.
Ahead of the meeting with the Mavericks, Cooper found it appropriate to give his team the weekend off.
Between Mach’s injury and teammates’ less significant bumps and bruises, their head coach felt some rest was in order.
“It’s been a really long two weeks here,” Cooper said of the start of the Sioux’s 2014-15 season, “and I think it was pretty telling tonight.
“We’ve got a couple of days off coming up before we play again, and it’s clear that we need it. We’re pretty beaten up and have some injuries like you always deal with, but we’re glad for another win, and we’re always going to take winning as often as we have here early in the season.”