The Two Towers

No, I'm not going to review the second of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I'm just describing a couple of the starters for Grace Baptist Academy, against whom the Patriots played tonight. The Patriots had no answer for Grace's height and dropped their seventh of the year, 44-25.

I will now do my broken record impersonation: the girls started slowly tonight. From now on, I will abbreviate when I describe the girls' first quarter thusly: TGSST. Grace scored the first twelve points of the contest, mostly by lobbing the ball over our girls' heads to one of their two six-footers, who held the ball high above their heads while our girls jumped vainly for the ball like children being teased by a parent. These girls were not very skilled, but could put the ball in the basket from five feet away on occasion. Becca had a nice put-back basket right before the buzzer so the score at the end of one was 12-2.

The second quarter started like the first quarter, with Grace scoring the first eight points. Finally the girls started playing aggressively. Kara had a couple baskets and a free throw for the Patriots' five points in the quarter while Grace scored four more resulting in a halftime score of 24-7.

The girls added to their momentum to open the third. They played much stronger defense and some shots started falling. Becca had another rebound basket, Rachel went hard to the basket a few times resulting in six free throw attempts, of which she hit three, and Kara had a couple of threes. The Patriots outscored Grace 11-4 in the quarter. It was one of their best quarters of the year. Becca played especially well, getting four rebound on just one possession.

The girls had high hopes of continuing the rally in the fourth, but Grace put both of the big girls back in to begin the quarter, and they went back to throwing the ball to the in the post and there was little we could do about it. Our offense was decent, but we could not stop the opponents. Grace had sixteen to our seven in the quarter, resulting in the final nineteen point deficit.

Kara led in scoring with sixteen, while Rachel had five and Becca four. Becca had seventeen rebounds, which is now the team record for rebounds in the game. Alyssa has the lone assist in the game. Kara had four steals and Rachel had four blocks. Kara and Alyssa had three turnovers each. Andrew said that Becca got the game ball today.

The girls will now have a week-plus break until the next game next Friday at Christian Liberty up in Arlington Heights.