Lady Owl's Take Care of Business

This weekend seemed like a cruise for the Lady Owl’s after the previous two games against Southern Oregon and Northwest Christian. Friday night’s game against Cascade found four people scoring in double figures (Crystal Idrogo 19, Amanda Johnston 13, Jenna Ball 11 and I had 17). Meagan Miyasaka had the only other standout statistic with 9 assists.

I have to tell you that I did not expect to come away with a 78-57 win. I thought the game was going to be a lot closer than that. Well…I think the 1-point defeat to them last year had a little something to do with it. I knew we could not underestimate them like we did last year, and from everything Coach Greenleaf told us they seemed to have improved tremendously. The focus for the game was to keep them off the boards and to pick up pressure defense well outside the 3-point line (their shooters are known to pull up from 25 feet). They have good shooters and we wanted to limit their looks at the basket. Coach compared them to Fresno Pacific, a team we played earlier in the year. He said if we played the kind of defense against Cascade that we did against Fresno Pacific we would have no problem. Based on our previous games, I did not know how that was going to go.

We came out of our little “slump” and held them to 38 percent shooting from the field, and a measly 25 percent from 3-point range. We also outrebounded them 45-35. We did everything we were supposed to and lo-and-behold, we came away with the 21-point victory.

Saturday night seemed just as easy as we defeated Warner Pacific 72-50. In the first half Crystal Idrogo was on fire! It seemed like she couldn’t miss from under the basket. We put in a new play this past week in practice, and we kept running it because they couldn’t defend it. Idrogo finished with 23 points and Jenna and I finished with 18 and 10 points apiece.

We also took advantage and ran the floor for 40 minutes—they couldn’t keep up. Our defensive emphasis was on keeping the ball out of the paint. They do not really have any good three-point shooters, so we had extra help from the wings down low. It turns out their leading scorer for the game was their post, #44 Danica Wilson, but she was the only one. We also did a great job keeping them off the boards, and crashing the offensive boards on our end. The final rebounding stats were Oregon Tech 50, Warner Pac 33.

In both wins this weekend we received great support and hard work from our “reinforcements” (as coach says). Megan Ross, Tabatha Cooke, and Crystal Trout in particular came in and gave us a great boost, while Jaclyn Unruh and Mackenzie Garton came in cold off the bench towards the end of the game and put in their best effort. Commends to all the reinforcements for their huge hearts!

Both teams head to Olympia and Kirkland, WA this Thursday to play Evergreen State College on Friday and Northwest University on Saturday. The plan, as always, is to come back with 4 wins and a clean sweep.