F-M girls pull away late in 51-30 victory

    TABOR - A 17-5 fourth quarter run and some nifty zone defensive work lifted the Fremont-Mills girls basketball team to a 51-30 victory over East Mills in Corner Conference action last Tuesday.

    “It wasn’t real pretty, we’re not known for winning pretty right now. But it’s a win. We’ll take it,” said Fremont-Mills coach Rod Williams after the game.
    East Mills came out hot from the floor, jumping out to a quick 7-0 lead. But the Knights didn’t stay down for long despite the early Wolverine run. The Knights scored the next nine points of the quarter and led 23-21 at the break.
    “The fourth quarter was obviously big for us but I was really impressed with how we dealt with the adversity of that first 7-0 run,” Williams said. “We really hadn’t seen that. We battled back and didn’t get stressed out, worked ourselves back in the game and we got up by two at halftime.”
    The Knights’ defense took over in the second half thanks to an unlikely ally in the form of a zone defense that Williams reluctantly turned to because of foul trouble. The change of plans seemed to work. Fremont-Mills held the Wolverines to nine second half points.
    “We made a couple of adjustments on defense and had our posts step up a little bit,” Williams said. “We would have loved to have pressed more but we had some foul trouble and backed out of that. We mixed in some zone defenses. I thought they (East Mills) passed the ball really well. (Devin) Laughlin did a super job finding the open girls. The first half we shut their guards down a little bit so the second half we wanted to take their post players out of it.”
    The Knights out-scored the Wolverines 14-5 in the final frame, with Macy Williams, the coach’s daughter, getting seven of her game high 21 in the quarter. Taryn Williams added 14 points and Emily Smith 11 for the game.
    “I told them to beat good teams we have to have five girls who can score because teams can’t adjust to that,” Williams said. “You can tell scoring is still difficult for us at times but we’re making progress.”
    East Mills shot just 16 percent from the field (9-of-53) for the game. They were led in scoring by Katie Sowers with nine points. Devin Laughlin added seven points, 10 rebounds and seven assists.
    “They played a lot of zone and we didn’t execute our zone offense very well. We had some good looks, we just couldn’t finish,” said East Mills coach Jeff Laughlin.

East Mills 51,
Heartland Christian 34
    The East Mills girls basketball team got its second win of the season on Friday with a 51-34 victory over Heartland Christian.
    Devin Laughlin led the Wolverines (2-6 overall, 2-3 in the conference) with 14 points, 11 assists and six steals.
    Katie Sowers and Stephanie McGrew chipped in with 12 points each. McGrew grabbed nine rebounds.
    The Wolverines out-shot the Eagles 45.6 percent (26-of-57) to 35.1 percent (13-of-37) and held a 35-20 rebounding edge.
    Dakota Jordan and Bethany Baker each scored 11 to lead Heartland Christian.