The Highlands varsity basketball teams got in one win and won loss against the visiting Andrews Wildcats on Wednesday night. The Lady Highlanders bested the Lady Wildcats in a strong 48-41 win, but then the Highlanders were defeated 71-28 by the Wildcats later on in boys game.
The girls’ game saw the Lady Highlanders getting an early lead, though the Lady Wildcats were on their tails the whole time.
Junior Hunter Conner scored plenty, as did senior Aislynn Wyatt-Luck and junior AE Woods.
The team made a lot of quick passes to wear down the Wildcats defense, and set up a strong, wide-spanning defense of their own which the Lady Wildcats couldn’t break through int he first half.
The third quarter began to see more quick turnovers with the score becoming deadlocked. The Lady Wildcats scored a three-pointer in the last minute of the third quarter, cutting the Highlands lead to 36-33.
No one scored for the first two minutes in the fourth quarter, but the Lady Highlanders kept their lead via some free throws.
Lady Highlander sophomore Charlotte Westerndorf landed a shot and got the score to 40-35 with the Lady Highlanders ahead.
Additional buckets from Wyatt-Luck and sophomore Jordan Borino got the score comfortably ahead, landing at 45-37 in favor of the Lady Highlanders.
Coach Brett Lamb was glad to get a win against Andrews, which he called a “well-coached team.”
“They shoot the ball extremely well,” he said. “It worried me going into that game that they’d make a lot of 3’s, and they made some, but we held ‘em off. We were well balanced. I think, the games we’ve been able to win, we had a well balanced scoring, we’ve rebounded well.”
Lamb said the team was working on understanding their opponents. For Andrews, he said that meant analyzing how to deal with the offense.
“This team, we don’t want to sink away from their shooters, we want to stay out on em,” he said.
He added that they’d gotten in “some timely defense and rebounding” at the end that cinched the win, and singled out Conner in particular for a great job. “She had 12 blocked shots, nine points, seven rebounds, you can’t ask much more out of her.”
The boys’ game started off strong for the Wildcats, who landed five points in the first minute of the game. They kept scoring for the bulk of the first quarter while also playing stifling defense.
The Highlanders scored two points by the end of the quarter, but the Wildcats had outpaced them early and were sitting at 18 points as the second quarter began.
As the game went on, the Highlanders found it hard to catch up. Near the end of the second quarter, Highlanders sophomore Jack Sumner got two baskets in a row in quick succession, and then moments later junior Isaiah Villardo made a three-pointer, raising the score to 38-13 in favors of the visitors.
Coach Kaitlin Bishop said the game was a “tough one” where the team hadn’t played as aggressively as they could.
“We came out sluggish and it was like we played in slow motion all night,” she said. “We didn’t play near as aggressive as we needed to in order to compete. Andrews really crashed the boards hard on both ends and we did not box out and rebound in the first half.”
She said they did better in the second half – but it was too late by then.
The Highlanders boys’ and girls’ varsity teams are next scheduled to play an away game against Murphy on Monday, Jan. 6.