ATTICA (Crawford County Now) — Seneca East has its sight set on competing for a Northern 10 Athletic Conference championship.
A young Bucyrus team aspires to do the same in the future.
Though outmanned and lacking experience, the gritty Lady Red hung with the veteran Lady Tigers for two quarters, trailing by just four at intermission.
But battle tested Seneca East turned up the pressure in the second half and eventually forced 39 Bucyrus turnovers to pull away to a 60-27 victory.
The Tigers didn’t shoot a high percentage, but they made it up in volume, attempting a monstrous 77 shots. Seneca East coach George Parks was not surprised.
“We probably missed 40 layups. We have not been shooting the ball well,” Parks said. “We’ve shot the ball well on game so far. We’ve been priding ourselves on defense, but we’ve got to fix the offense.”
Bucyrus coach Brian Seybert was happy that his youthful squad — with just one senior and one junior on the roster — was able to compete with the Tigers for a half.
“They’re going to be challenging for the league, that’s for sure,” Seybert said of the Tigers. “They’ve got one of the best post players in the league in (Alexa) Snay, which really made Savannah (Clark) work in the middle.”
Trailing 12-5 after one, the Lady Red put 12 on the board in the second quarter. Freshman Ni’Cia Floyd scored nine of her team-high in the frame and classmate Maci Messerschmidt added three as upstart Bucyrus (0-7, 0-3 N10) trimmed its deficit to 21-17 by intermission.
“We just talked at halftime. It didn’t matter what defense we ran in the first half,” Parks said. “We got outhustled, we got outplayed. To Brian’s credit, his girls came out and responded, played well.”
Whatever the message Parks and the coaching staff delivered was motivation enough for the talented Tigers.
Seneca East (5-1, 2-1) came out of the locker room with a vengeance. A pressing trapping defense resulted in 15 turnovers for the Lady Red in the third quarter after just 12 in the first half.
“We’ve got a freshman point guard who’s really good, Ni’Cia,” Seybert said. “They took advantage of some inexperience that she has, but she’s a tough player and she’s going to learn from it, she’s going to grow from it.”
Snay scored 10 of her game-high 22 points in the third period as the Tigers used an 18-5 advantage to turn a 4-point halftime edge into a 17-point bulge, 39-22, after three.
“We were only up by (four) at half and went on a (16-2) run,” Parks said. “But I told the girls we can’t just turn it on. We’re not that good. We’ve got to play with that intensity the whole game. The biggest thing from tonight is to build off what we did well and learn from our mistakes.”
Izzy Stockmaster seconded Snay’s 22 with 15 points for Seneca East. Nine Tigers reached the scoring column. Luella Burkholder had eight rebounds as the hosts pulled down 49 — 27 of which were on the offensive end. The coach pointed to that, along with the turnovers, as the key to the second half.
Clark supported Floyd’s 15 with six points and seven points. Floyd had eight boards.
“For us, with what we were doing, I thought we came out and executed pretty well,” Seybert said. “And the girls gave themselves a shot. If we made a few more buckets, maybe we have the lead at halftime. It was probably one of the best halves we played in the entire year so far.”
“They’re young girls,” Parks said of Bucyrus. “We came out, we were flat. We missed a lot of wide-open layups. A couple of the girls started getting down on themselves and I put a little more pressure on them than normal. I got in their face to see how they handled I and they handled it really well in the second half.”
“We’re still growing — a lot of growing pains,” Seybert said. “If we can handle pressure from one of the top teams (in the N10) and we can break it when we get the opportunity, we’ve just got to finish when we break it. We’ve struggled with that at times.”
Seneca East won the two-quarter junior varsity game, 32-5.
Box score
Bucyrus 5 12 5 5 — 27
Seneca East 12 9 18 21 — 60
Bucyrus (0-7, 0-3 N10): Shots 8-31; 3-pt. shots 1-8 (Karlee Shull); Free throws 10-17; Rebounds 36 (Ni’Cia Floyd 8, Savannah Clark 7); Turnovers 39. Scoring: Ni’Cia Floyd 5 5 15, Karlee Shull 1 0 3, Maci Messerschmidt 1 1 3, Savannah Clark 1 4 6.
Seneca East (5-1, 2-1 N10): Shots 24-77; 3-pt. shots 2-16 (Valerie Bordner, Aubrey Ritzler); Free throws 10-20; Rebounds 49 (Luella Burkholder 8, Karli Foos 7); Turnovers 16. Scoring: Cami Lantz 0 2 2, Valerie Bordner 1 0 3, Alexa Snay 9 4 22, Allie Smith 0 1 1, Julia Enders 1 0 2, Aubrey Ritzler 2 0 5, Izzy Stockmaster 6 3 15, Luella Burkholder 4 0 8, Lillian Burkholder 1 0 2.
JV: Seneca East 32-5 (2 quarters).