SYRACUSE – The Wawasee girls basketball team got itself a long-awaited win. Extending the Whitko Lady Wildcats’ (5-12) losing streak to six games with a 45-28 win Tuesday night in Syracuse, the Wawasee Lady Warriors (7-8) snapped an eight-game losing streak of its own. “It’s a relief,” Wawasee coach Kem Zolman said about his team’s first win since Nov. 27. “You work so hard with the kids, that you want them to see progress. But when you have such a young team, we see progress (in practice), we just don’t see it on the floor. Maybe it’s because of the competition, the high-level (teams) we were going against for a while. You just need one to show the girls they are progressing.” While many of the Lady Warriors are progressing, senior KiLee Knafel has been a constant, averaging 24.9 points, 6.7 rebounds, 4.1 assists and 2.1 steals. In the win, the 5-foot-7 guard was hounded by 5-10 Whitko senior Josie Sparks and was relegated to seven points through the first three quarters. But in the fourth, she drained a three-pointer in the first 10 seconds and went on to connect on all five of her field goal attempts, netting 12 in the quarter. “Through three quarters, she’d played (all) 24 minutes,” Whitko coach Brandon Bradley said of Sparks. “She was exhausted. She did everything she could in the time she was in there. She was effective, unfortunately, our help in the fourth quarter broke down.” While her teammates kept Wawasee in front, Knafel seemed to put the game away, beginning with a steal and a layup with 24 seconds remaining in the third quarter. That bucket ignited a 16-4 Lady Warriors’ run that resulted in the final score. Once it was over, Knafel had 19 points, six steals and three rebounds in the victory. “She’s just as tickled to death as anybody,” Zolman said of Knafel, who will sign to play basketball at IUSB Thursday afternoon. “She got her points and we got the win.” For the first time in a long time, Knafel almost wasn’t the team’s leading scorer. After three quarters, freshman Kylee Rostochak was the team’s top point-getter with eight, but Knafel’s big fourth changed that. “This is one of the first games where we may have convinced the girls what we’ve been trying to get through to them all year long,” Zolman said. “People are going to come out and play us like that (face-guarding Knafel) – they’ve done it all year, but the other girls would kind of just do their thing. We had seven girls score for us tonight. That was very good for us.” Whitko was led by senior Cagney Craig, who posted eight points, four rebounds, four assists and two steals, but 6-foot junior center Jordan Hall struggled to use her size advantage, scoring four points and nabbing six boards. “I think she gets comfortable thinking she’s three or four inches taller than the person she’s playing against, so she can be big and stay up-and-down,” Bradley said of Hall, who didn’t get a shot attempt in the second half. “She loses leverage that way.” Entering the season with a lot of inexperience, Whitko has been hit with a lot of injuries as well, beginning with a season-ending injury to 5-10 starting junior Bailee Juillerat in the second game of the year. “They’ve been handed a major disadvantage, and it’s not really fair to them,” Bradley said of the injuries, with the latest being to starting junior guard Kelly Reiff Saturday at Southwood. “We’ve had a broken ankle, a severely sprained ankle, mono, broken knee cap, broken wrist, (an) ACL (injury), three concussions. We’ve seen just about everything this year, but what we’re trying to teach them is they can not lean on that and make that an excuse not to win. You have to persevere and rise above it.” Whitko will look to reverse its fortunes Saturday at Northfield in Three Rivers Conference play, while Wawasee is in Northern Lakes Conference action Saturday at Plymouth.
