SYRACUSE – Whitko High School’s varsity girls basketball team hit Wawasee with an 18-4 second-quarter haymaker to take a 19-point halftime advantage Tuesday night. The Lady Warriors stabilized themselves and closed the gap, but the second half comeback wasn’t enough in the Lady Wildcats’ 48-37 non-conference win at the Hardwood Teepee. Aly Reiff and Brianna Cumberland led Whitko to its big halftime lead, with Reiff scoring 16 points spread evenly between the first two quarters, and Cumberland hitting a trio of shots from beyond the arc for nine points. Meanwhile, Wawasee could manage only one field goal and a pair of free throws in the second quarter. After trimming only a single point off the lead in the third quarter, Wawasee’s leading scorer, Kylee Rostochak, found her shooting stroke and scored 15 points, including a pair of treys, in the fourth quarter. She finished with a game-high 21 points, while Elizabeth Jackson added nine. On the other side, Whitko’s Reiff and Cumberland scored only nine second-half points between them. Reiff finished with 20 points, and Cumberland 14. Lady Wildcat head coach Brandon Bradley offered an explanation of the tale of two halves. “For the first half, they played their typical 1-2-2 extended defense, and we were prepared for that,” he said. “In the second half, they switched to a triangle-and-two, and chased Cumberland and Reiff. We’re prepared for that; we’ve worked on that in practice, and we’ve seen it a lot. We’ve played well against it at times. But tonight, for whatever reason, we stood a lot instead of continuing to screen, and continue to cut. I think we were satisfied with a 19-point lead at halftime, and I think that was the reason for the dismissive offense. “Defensively, we were stagnant there, too,” continued Bradley. “We stood a lot more, we were late on closeout. We were reacting instead of attacking. I thought in the first half we attacked a lot more. “I think we feed a lot off of the momentum, both positively and negatively, and I think that’s a problem. I think we need to find some stability. I told them after the game ‘listen, this game was not about game plan, this was not about personnel, it was all about roller coaster of emotions.’ We have to do a better job of centering ourselves. We can’t be in a position where when things go good they go really good and when they go bad they go really, really bad. We have to be steady.” On the other side of the gym, Wawasee head coach Kem Zolman felt like his players were creatures of habit, as the Lady Warriors are forced to play from behind much of the time. “We get ourselves in a mind funk, and there’s not a thing we (coaches) can do with them until they get out of it,” Zolman said. “We don’t hustle to places, we don’t have people shoot wide-open threes, we go through the scouting report and know who the scorers are, but don’t pay any attention to that. We just do what we want to do, pretty much. And we do this in practice, too. They’re working on it, it’s not like they don’t want to work on it. That’s just what this team does. They’re working on it really hard. They’re great kids, but it’s really hard breaking bad habits. “When you get down 20 it’s easy to come back. It’s easy to play free. There’s nothing really on the line right now. It’s harder to play that way at the beginning. We’re waiting until we get 10, 15, 20 points down, then we decide to play. We’re self-destructing. In practice we go through three or four possessions before we get something right. I’ve tried everything in my coaching repertoire to break that habit. It’s just got to be a mindset that we continually get ourselves in that position and it hurts us.” With the win, Whitko will take a 10-7 record into its Three Rivers Conference road game at Northfield at 2:30 p.m. Saturday. The Lady Wildcats have a double digit win total in consecutive seasons for the first time since 2006-08 seasons. Wawasee fell to 4-13 on the season, and will travel to Northern Lakes Conference foe Plymouth Saturday night.
