Owensboro had a strong defensive effort to beat Owensboro Catholic 60-52 on home court. The defense by the Lady Red Devils played directly into their offense and helped them secure easy buckets, and they took advantage of any and all open looks they had throughout the night.
Shalyn Sprinkles opened the game’s scoring with a three pointer. The first quarter was evenly matched as neither team could gain a comfortable lead at the end of the first. Owensboro had 4 three-pointers in the first quarter as part of their 9 overall on the night. Head coach Jansen Locher encourages his team to shoot as much as they can as he knows they have the confidence to do so.
“That’s how we coach them,” he said. “I’d rather get a shot than a turnover. If you have open shots you have to take open shots. We have a lot of girls who have the confidence to sit there and make a lot of them. We may not do it every game, but we’ve got several girls up and down our lineup that can sit and take shots and make them.”
In the second quarter, the Lady Red Devils’ defense began to take the spotlight as they held the Lady Aces to just 6 points in the quarter while scoring 16 of their own. This gave Owensboro a 32-21 lead going into halftime. OHS had plenty of breakaway buckets throughout the game stemming from their tight defense. Locher said the team played great defense as a team, but had high praise for Unique Carter-Swanagan as he considers the guard to be the best defender in the region.
“It was great,” he said. “When we play together like we did tonight, we’re a very good defensive team. That led to some easy baskets or us. Shalyn starting off the game with the amount of threes she hit got us going offensively. Then we just let our defense takeover. We asked A’lyrica to do some things tonight that most people can’t do as far as guarding some guards and guarding down in the post. Unique is the best on ball defender in my book in probably the region. As an on-ball guard she’s tough and she makes a lot of (?). That’s just a great team out there. I thought our defensive effort was awesome tonight and that led us to some easy buckets to get us kind of rolling.”
After Carter-Swanagan and Sprinkles both hit threes to open the half, Owensboro Catholic got their offense back in motion to fight back. Threes by Riley Karmin and Aubrey Randolph helped OCHS score 17 in the third quarter, but Owensboro were still riding the momentum from the first half. The Lady Red Devils had 4 three pointers to contribute to their 18 total points in the quarter.
OCHS mounted a final offensive in the final quarter as they outscored OHS 14-10. The Lady Aces strung together some quick baskets late in the fourth quarter thanks to a couple of steals. However, OHS had too much of a lead for Catholic to claw their way back before the buzzer, and Owensboro took the win 60-52. Locher attributed the overall team effort to winning the battles necessary on defense that led to their many breakaway baskets.
“I think it was super helpful because it gave us a lot of extra possessions,” he said. “I feel like we got a lot of 50/50 balls. I feel like most of the time there were jump balls because we were the ones playing defense and getting those jump balls. We played team defense tonight. Everybody was fighting for loose balls, everybody was battling for rebounds and nobody was taking possessions off. That was huge tonight.”
