RICH KELLY
ANDOVER TOWNSHIP — Not too many basketball fans in this area are unaware by now that Pymatuning Valley girls teams play defense first and foremost, coming at opponents with speed, agility, court awareness, and numbers off the bench that do the same thing.
The Lakers did their thing with a twist Thursday night as they throttled Northeastern Athletic Conference rival Maplewood, 67-29.
The Lakers (12-2, 8-0) jumped out to a quick 10-0 lead in the first four minutes and were never seriously threatened by smothering the Rockets every move, especially in controlling Melissa Sloan, Maplewood’s top player. She had gone to the foul line for 20 attempts in the previous meeting between the squads, but the Lakers considered it a major success to hold her to a 6-of-11 night in Thursday’s game, a major goal for coach Jeff Compan’s girls.
“Our defense was really good tonight,” he said. “We especially wanted to keep a close eye on Sloan because she got us for 20 free throws the last time we played them. Keeping her off the line was our major goal tonight, and we did a nice job on her. We doubled up quickly, and forced Sloan to stay out of the lane, where she likes to drive to the basket.
“We had some problems shooting the ball tonight, especially layups, because we had a few times, like we do from time to time, where we lost our focus on what we wanted to do. We shot the ball better in the second half, and it was very good for us to play Badger and Maplewood back to back like we did this week. Playing Badger and Sarah Bonar helped us a lot in preparing for tonight’s game and Melissa Sloan.”
For Maplewood (2-8, 2-6), there wasn’t anything surprising coming from PV.
“We know that PV will play a lot of pressure defense from the start of the game,” coach Mark Yoder said. “When we did have some success breaking their pressure to get open looks at the hoop, we couldn’t knock down the shots.
“That’s been our problem all year. We had our chances to score early in the game and didn’t capitalize on them. After we got down so fast, too, we had some mental breakdowns with our game plan, PV was off to the races for layups at the other end, and they’re too good a team to do that as often as we did.”
The Laker defense kept the Rockets from getting too many good looks, and when they did get them, the shots weren’t falling as they hit on only 8-of-45 shots for 17.7 percent.
PV didn’t exactly torch the twine, either. After a 12-of-40 first half, it heated up in the second half to finish with 25 hoops in 67 tries, a 37.3 clip.
Sloan paced the Rocket attack with 10 points, but she will be seeing double shadows for a while with Laker faces on them after this game.
Nine of 12 PV players scored and 11 of 12 grabbed at least one rebound as it won that battle, 42-34. Josey Workman led the Lakers in that department with 10 rebounds. When the Rockets got close enough for a shot, PV often swatted them away, blocking 10 tries. Colleen Wonderling played defense with an attitude in this game, soundly rejecting five Maplewood shot attempts.
Nicole Virostek led the Lakers with 14 points. Kayla Martin came off the bench and provided a powerful inside presence with 13 points.
Kelly is a freelance writer from Jefferson.
