By Garth Shanklin
Sports Editor
The Bethel-Tate Lady Tigers’ basketball team is on a roll. Since dropping a 40-38 decision to Amelia in the team’s second game of the season to fall to 0-2 on the year, Dave Fallis’ squad is undefeated, having won their last four games entering a Dec. 15 contest against Felicity.
The Lady Tigers jumped ahead to a 16-4 lead at the end of the first quarter. By halftime, Bethel-Tate led 30-5 en route to a 52-22 victory.
Head coach Dave Fallis said the team had to do a bit of shuffling in their lineup as Allison Parks was unable to play due to injury.
“We had some adversity, our starting guard was out today with back spasms,” Fallis said. “It caused some other people to step up, which they did. We were real happy with everyone’s performance tonight.”
That allowed younger players to play a larger role in the team’s game plan. Madison Burton scored eight points for the Lady Tigers and grabbed six rebounds. Sarah Gardner added five points and three boards.
Getting the younger players to grow is a crucial part of the Lady Tigers’ plan for success both this season and down the road.
“We need to develop those young kids as quickly as possible,” Fallis said. “At the same time, we don’t want to put any additional pressure on them. Their attitudes are fantastic, they play well through mistakes. They’re all extremely coachable, and as a coach you can’t ask for anything more than that.”
Even though the names in the starting lineup changed, the approach the Lady Tigers took to the game did not, according to Fallis.
“It didn’t change our approach at all,” Fallis said. “We told everybody at the beginning of the year that everyone has to play every position in our offense. We don’t go by the number system this year. That makes it easy when we have someone out, the next girl just steps up. We really didn’t miss a beat, and that just shows those kids have been practicing hard and they’re ready to play when they get their time. When they get a few minutes on the court, they make it count.”
The Lady Tigers shot 44 percent from the field, led by Morgan Reinhart’s 12 point, 11 rebound effort. Reagan Leonard scored 10 points and picked up eight more boards.
Defensively, the Lady Tigers totaled 15 steals, five of which were attributed to Haylee Foster. Fallis said the team has been prioritizing defensive play of late.
“We’ve really been focusing on the defensive end,” Fallis said. “We’ve spent a lot of time in practice on it. We’ve been working on individual defense, one on one. We know that we have to keep teams under 40 points, that’s our magic number. If we keep teams under 40, we should compete in most of the games we play. We talk about that every time out, every quarter end. The girls know that’s our emphasis this year, it has to be defensively driven.”
Kylie Sponcil led Felicity with 8 points. Lauren Mitchell added 5 and Madison Baird scored 4, all in the fourth quarter. Felicity head coach Kerry Stamper said the team’s inability to prevent the Lady Tigers’ from going on the fast-break doomed the squad.
“We couldn’t hit,” Stamper said. “We couldn’t stop on defense. Fast breaks killed us. Boxing out defensively, we gave up a lot of second and third shots. We weren’t going to the boards on offense and we weren’t hitting. That combination is a disaster.”
Stamper added the team’s lack of consistency on offense is something that they have to keep working on, even though they have been since the season began.
“We’ve been working on that since day one,” Stamper said. “We’re not consistent offensively, we have to get more consistency. Defensively, when we’re not, we have to step it up.”
Stamper saw some positives in the play of the Lady Cardinals, specifically when it came to rotating on both sides of the ball.
“We had a lot of good rotations on offense,” Stamper said. “We got inside out and that worked really well, then we quit doing that. Defensively, there were times where we had great help rotation and times where it relaxed and they got layups.”
Bethel-Tate’s win was the fifth straight victory since the Amelia loss. Fallis said the team has grown since that game and has learned from their mistakes.
“We feel like that game got away from us,” Fallis said. “We have a saying that winners never lose, you either win or you learn. We bring that game up from time to time. We feel that we could’ve played better, we made mistakes. We didn’t play as a team. We didn’t handle adversity very well, now we have. We’re battle tested now, and I think that’s a sign of our team growing and playing together.”
The Lady Tigers return to the court for their final game before the holidays with a road contest at Gamble Montessori on Jan. 23 at 7:30 p.m. Felicity faced off against Batavia on Wednesday, Dec. 21 in a game that was not completed before press time. The Cardinals return to action on Jan. 4 against Cincinnati Country Day.
