Quick update

Just a quick update between games of the girls tournament at Grace Baptist in Kankakee:

On Thursday both teams traveled to Romeoville; the girls for their first game against the Kingsmen (Kingswomen? Queenswomen?) and the boys' second. First up was the girls. This is Romeoville's first season as a high school team; they are primarily playing a JV schedule. Most of their girls are junior high age. This was quite evident in the game. By the end of the third quarter it was 30-4. It could have been more, as the girls were working on a new play and it took a while to get it down. It could have been less, since the starters stayed in that long to work on that play. The final was 34-7. Kara led in scoring with ten, while Rachel had eight and Becca six. Becca had nine rebounds, Kara had nine steals and Lee had five assists.

The boys game had a little different flavor than the first time we played Romeoville. Romeoville kept their starters in longer this game and played a little tougher defense. The Kingsmen also went harder on offense; in other words, they seemed to take us more seriously this time. The result of this hard play was a twenty-point lead at the half. In the second, Romeoville relaxed a bit, and the Patriots picked up their game. Steve B. was put in for the second half, and while he had trouble getting shots to go down, he seemed to settle down the offense. The overall defense was much better in the second half as well, even with Luke Lorenz fouling out rather early. HSRC played even with Romeoville in the half, with each team scoring sixteen points. Leading scorer was Dustin with eleven. Justin was right behind with ten. Justin also had seven rebounds and six steals. Dustin added six rebounds.

Tonight the girls played their first round game of the Grace tournament. The tournament was seeded, but since not enough information was provided by the participants, the seeding was quite off. LaLumiere and Tri-Point are probably the two best teams. LaLumiere was seeded close to correct at two, but Tri-Point was seeded seven. Westlake, the one seed, should probably have been seeded sixth or seventh. Heritage, our opponent tonight, was definitely top three, but they were seeded four, and since we were seeded five, we got to play them first. We had played them earlier this year, and lost by eleven. Tonight the defenses were much tougher - both ours and theirs. Not so much ours at first. It was 11-0 at the end of one quarter. Heritage made five of eleven shots. Their talented and tall junior center, Danielle Zandstra, was shooting and dishing. Our girls had a hard time with their man-to-man defense. The new plays that the team just learned started clicking in the second. While Heritage added seven more, HSRC scored eight. Ironically, even though Heritage was much taller, we got our points inside. Rachel had six and Becca had two in the quarter. In the second half, our defense really got tough. Heritage went seven for seventeen in the first half; in the second, they were four for twenty-four. However, our offense just couldn't do anything in the second themselves. The Patriots scored a total of six in the half to Heritage's nine, for a final of 27-14.

Becca scored all of the second-half points to give her a total of eight for the game. Rachel got the rest of the points. Rachel had ten rebounds and Becca had nine. Alyssa had six steals and Kara had three assists.

Tomorrow we will play LaLumiere for fifth place at 10:00 AM. Lalumiere is a tough, talented team, so it should be quite a challenge. Hope to see you there.