Sports
The young and the relentless
Matthew Semisch
02/03/2015
Only a week and a half ago, Westhope-Newburg’s (W-N) girls’ basketball team was in a world of trouble.
A 49-48 loss at Dunseith on Jan. 23 condemned the Sioux to their sixth consecutive loss and dropped them to 6-8 on the season. What had started out as a very promising campaign for W-N seemed to be slipping away.
That all changed last week.
Following a 54-37 victory over Des Lacs-Burlington (DL-B) last Monday, W-N made the short trip to Bottineau on Thursday to take on District 11 and intra-county rival Bottineau High.
The Stars had been experiencing recent troubles of their own, having lost each of their last three games. W-N pushed that skid to four on Thursday thanks to a 57-54 win on BHS’s home court.
One of the biggest reasons for the Sioux’s success (8-8, 2-4 in District 11) on Thursday was the play of eighth-grader Abbie Jiles. A transfer to W-N from Pocahontas, Ark., over the recent winter break, Jiles led both teams with 22 points, including 10 in the fourth quarter.
“I actually feel like I could’ve done a little bit better in the situation we were in, but I’m just happy we got the win,” Jiles said after Thursday’s game.
“I just try to go hard on every play and that’s what I tried to do today and that’s what our whole team did.”
Determination was another factor that fell in W-N’s favor. Both coaches, the Sioux’s Jordan Cooper and Bottineau’s Joe Bender, agreed that W-N wanted a win on Thursday more than the Stars did.
“I’m just so happy for the girls,” Cooper said of his Sioux’s performance against the Stars. “They played their hearts out tonight, and we’d been talking for a while about finishing plays and making those big plays that win basketball games, and we made them tonight.
“Sometimes you’ve got to go through problems related to that before you actually get it, and so we do some of those small things now that maybe we didn’t before,” he continued. “We’ve got to have that extra step or make that one extra play, and we did in this game.”
On the other side of the locker room divide, Bender agreed with his W-N counterpart. He also lamented what he felt was BHS’s (7-9, 2-4) lack of both desire and execution.
“Westhope had a lot more desire tonight than we had, and we need to change that in ourselves,” Bender said. “We need to change how we start games and how we finish games and understand how important every single possession is, and when you get ahead you need to take care of the ball, and we were up a couple of times in the second half there, but we’re just not taking advantage of possessions that are so important. We work our tails off to get ahead but then we slip back on a couple of possessions, and we didn’t maintain our intensity.
“We were very lethargic and very slow in all aspects of the game,” Bender continued. “Our defense was poor, we couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn (on offense), and it’s just frustrating.”
Kennedy Olson led the Stars with 14 points and eight rebounds.
W-N visited Berthold on Monday after press time and will visit Rolette-Wolford on Thursday. The Sioux will be on the road again on Saturday when they take on Surrey.
STARS EDGE TITANS
Bottineau’s week became all the more trying on Friday. In the Stars’ final home game of the season, BHS eked out a 44-43 win against non-district opponent Des Lacs-Burlington (DL-B).
Bottineau opened the game with an 8-0 run and rattled off an 11-0 run to end the first half. Other than that, though, the Stars had trouble shaking the Lady Lakers off.
The game arguably couldn’t have ended quickly enough for BHS. The Lady Lakers outscored Bottineau 10-2 in the fourth quarter, with Maria Diepolder scoring the Stars’ lone bucket.
BHS visited Mohall-Lansford-Sherwood (M-L-S) on Monday night after press time. The Stars will also visit Our Redeemer’s on Thursday and Kenmare on Friday.