Sports

Sioux advance to district’s final day

By Tyler Ohmann

03/05/2013

Sixth-seeded Westhope-Newburg fell in round one of the District 11 Tournament last Friday to three seed Towner-Granville-Upham, but redeemed themselves with a 46-41 win on Saturday over Sawyer to advance to the region qualifier game.

The Sioux struggled on Friday as they played a talented Titans team. TGU rolled over the Sioux in a 64-32 opening round win, which started from close to finish.

The Titans went on to upset Rugby and advance to the championship game against Velva tonight.

“We didn’t handle their pressure very well,” said Sioux head coach Jordan Cooper about the loss to the Titans. “They’re a good team, and they got a lot of talent.”

Following the loss the Sioux had to play seven seed Sawyer in the second round’s loser-out game.

The Sioux and the Flashes battled throughout, though the Sioux controlled the game most of the way.

However, after a 10-point Sioux lead after three quarters the Flashes made a fourth-quarter rally, but fell short in the 46-41 finish.

“Against Sawyer we played really well,” Cooper said. “The ball was going in the hole, because we passed it around and because we took better shots.”

Westhope-Newburg was led by senior Jade Teske’s 15 points. Teske hit a variety of mid-range jump shots that kept falling for the Sioux. Fellow senior Bailey Tofteland had 14 points and Lauren Mach added 10 points in the win.

“I was really happy with the effort against Sawyer,” Cooper said. “There were girls on the floor for the ball, and you could really see it was do or die time.”

“The seniors especially played really well, and it takes a couple of those games to get them all on the same page, and all gelling,” Cooper added.

McKenzi Faul led the Flashes with 12 points.
Cooper has seen improvement from the Sioux during the latter part of the season.

“Our intensity has really been a lot better these past couple of games,” Cooper said. “We’ve really started to understand the concept of team the last four or five games.”

The win advanced the Sioux to a region-qualifier against Dunseith at 6 p.m. tonight. The game was rescheduled from yesterday due to weather.

Cooper thinks that if the Sioux can get a couple baskets early it can help their confidence to pull off an upset.

“Once they see the ball go in the hole a couple times, that kind of encourages them a little bit that they are doing something right,” Cooper said.

“We’ve realized that we are only making 15 percent of our three-point shots, so we’re taking fewer three pointers and getting the ball inside and taking higher percentage shots.”

The Dragons beat the Sioux 43-30 in their regular season match up.