Sports
Stars show can-do attitude
Matthew Semisch
12/30/2014
Bottineau High’s girls’ basketball team didn’t end the 2014 portion of its schedule the way the Stars wanted.
However, following a 63-50 home loss to North Star last Monday, the Stars didn’t come away entirely empty-handed.
Bottineau wasn’t expected to defeat the Bearcats, a group that opened the season ranked No. 10 in the statewide girls’ Class B poll.
The Stars ensured that nothing came easy for the Cando-Bisbee-Egeland co-op, though, which made it easy for BHS head coach Joe Bender to find a silver lining.
“I was extremely happy with how the girls played tonight,” he said. “We missed a few lay-ins that would’ve pushed us even closer to Cando than we were, and that’s regrettable.
“But, aside from that, we just played really well and I was really proud of our girls.”
BEARCATS LEAP OUT FRONT
The Bearcats (5-2) took the upper hand early in the game and rarely trailed, but they had issues shaking the Stars off. North Star found itself up 16-11 after eight minutes, and that seemed comfortable compared to the Bearcats’ razor-thin 33-32 advantage at halftime.
After dropping 21 points on North Star in the second quarter, Bottineau hoped to carry momentum from that beyond the interval.
That didn’t happen, though, as the Stars only managed to post five points in the third frame.
Bender felt that, in that quarter, the Stars were hampered in part by their scoring woes but also by a high-intensity North Star defense for which BHS didn’t have a strong enough answer.
“We only scored a handful of points in that quarter, and that hurt us,” Bender said, “but North Star came out in a lot of man-to-man defense tonight, and we struggled a little against that.
“Seeing that was good, though, because it’ll make us better down the road. You don’t like to lose, but it’s helpful when we play teams as good as this who show us what we need to work on.”
Because of their strong third-quarter performance, the Bearcats took a 46-37 lead into the final quarter and didn’t let go.
Bottineau was much improved in the fourth frame and put 13 more points on the board next to North Star’s 17, but it wasn’t enough.
SECONDARY SCORING
Although she started the game on the bench, BHS junior forward Kelsey Bowers led the Stars against North Star with 12 points and six rebounds. Eight of her 12 points came in the second quarter to help Bottineau build up its comeback bid.
“She’s playing really well, and she did tonight, and she likes the role of coming off of the bench like she has recently here,” Bender said. “She accepts the role and she owns it and she knows what she’s doing, and she makes her minutes out there count.
“It’s nice to be able to get contributions like that off of the bench, and the bench in general’s starting to really come on nicely.”
In terms of Bottineau’s starters against the Bearcats, center Kennedy Olson led the Stars with 11 points, two rebounds and as many assists and blocked shots.
The Stars’ downfall didn’t come down to a want of trying. Coming off of a 66-45 pounding at the hands of Langdon just two days before on Dec. 20, the Stars (2-3) played arguably their best game of the season against North Star.
There wasn’t much more, Bender said, that he could’ve expected from a BHS team that gave North Star a more hard-fought game than what might’ve been expected.
“After Langdon and how that went, we played way better tonight, way better,” Bender said, “Against a team like (North Star), we needed to.
“Playing teams like that helps us for when we get into district play, and those teams in our district are going to be surprised at how far we’ve already come.”
Where wins and losses are concerned, Bottineau hasn’t experienced the best start to this season.
Much of that lack of success can be chalked up, however, to the Stars’ competition level. Bender put together a very tough non-district schedule for his Stars to cut their teeth against ahead of their District 11 opener at home on Jan. 6 against Velva.
BHS’s game this Friday at Watford City won’t be easy, either.
“We’re giving them some of the Christmas break off,” Bender said moments after the loss to North Star, “but we’ll have open gyms and practices starting up again, but Watford will be tough.
“It’s a long trip with four hours on a bus, and the kids will be tired, but they’re ready.”
That much Bender is sure of, and the Stars’ performance against North Star bolstered their head coach’s confidence.
“I knew that the first handful of games, those first seven, were going to be a lot to deal with, but it’s going to make us better in the long-term,” Bender said.”
“The girls know it, too, and they weren’t down after this tonight. They don’t like to lose, but they tried hard and hustled and gave a very good team all they could handle.”