By Brennan Stebbins (For OzarksSportsZone.com)
Believe it or not, the McAuley Catholic girls basketball team usually gets off to a slow start.
That certainly wasn’t the case on Saturday night, when the Warriors scored the first 12 points of the game and led by 27 at halftime.
In a contest that was over long before the final buzzer, top-seeded McAuley rolled second seed Dadeville 73-48 in the Class 1 District 5 championship at Liberal.
“That was something we really focused on this game,” McAuley coach Mike Howard said. “This whole entire year we’ve been a team that hasn’t come out strong. We usually pick it up in the second quarter and we haven’t done a lot in the first quarter so we really emphasized getting out in front early, getting the crowd into it and that way you can get that energy built up and just go forward from there. They did an amazing job in that first quarter of jumping out to that lead and playing great defense.”
McAuley sophomore Kennedy DeRuy opened the game with a three pointer and made two more in the first quarter on her way to a 17-point first half. And Sophomore Kayleigh Teeter added 12 points before halftime.
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It took nearly five minutes for Dadeville to score its first basket and the Warriors led by as many as 15 points in the first quarter. It was a 48-21 game at halftime.
The Bearcats had just six players on their roster – four of them freshmen – and they struggled all night against McAuley’s full-court pressure.
Dadeville turned it over 19 times in the first half, including at least six times on inbounds plays.
“It was a rough start,” Dadeville coach James Cowan said. “We’ve got a bunch of young players that played the majority of our minutes and tonight they picked a night to play like they were young. We knew what they were going to do, we just weren’t able to execute what we needed to do to start the game.”
“You’ve got to give them credit,” he said. “They did a great job on defense. It was tough for us to get open.”
The Bearcats actually outscored McAuley 27-25 in the second half after calming down at intermission.
“We started doing what we do in the second half,” Cowan said. “It’s easy to do that when you start down by 20 to get back to what you’re doing but I thought our players did a good job in the second half.”
Howard said the Warriors were focused on Dadeville freshman Libby Lakey and keeping the ball out of her hands.
“She’s a great guard even though she’s only a freshman,” he said. “She’s going to be a special player. We knew she was very talented and we knew she could handle the ball really well so our game plan was to not let her touch the ball when she got it back inbounds so we wanted the rest of the team to try to beat us and not allow her to dribble the ball up the floor. Just keep them uncomfortable, keep them off balance. I think it worked pretty well.”
McAuley, 19-7, benefited from two 20-point scorers in the game with DeRuy leading the team with 27 points and Teeter adding 21. The Warriors connected on nine three pointers.
Dadeville, 9-17, was led by freshman Chloe Cornelison, who scored 18. Lakely and sophomore Breanna Wince each scored 10. All six Bearcats contributed points.
With its first district title since 2007 under its belt, McAuley now turns its focus to a sectional game Tuesday in Nevada against Montrose.
“We’re going to celebrate tonight but then we’ll get back to work tomorrow,” Howard said.
