Lady Pioneers grinding through 'the process'

TEN SLEEP - Trusting the process can be difficult, especially when it does not equate to wins, and for the Ten Sleep Lady Pioneers girls basketball team they are keeping their heads down, working hard and looking for anyway to snag a W.

The senior-less Lady Pioneers (6-7 overall, 0-4 1A Northwest) suffered a pair of defeats last week, losing to conference foe the No. 4-ranked St. Stephens 46-35 and to Arvada-Clearmont 24-19.

Against St. Stephens (11-2, 3-0), the Lady Pioneers stuck with Lady Eagles in the first half, trailing 19-18, but a few lapses in the second half proved to be their undoing.

"We lost, but it was a good effort. It's all about the process, we've talked about crawling before we can walk. We played really well, we stuck them defensively and if we only had one more player just to give a little more rest. The second half we lost track of a few of their leak outs and they got some easy buckets off of that," said Ten Sleep girls basketball coach Sarah Novak.

Sophomore guard Bryley Moore had 18 points, seven steals and five rebounds for the Lady Pioneers, "She played well and had a good line," said Novak.

For having such a youthful team, two juniors, a sophomore and three freshmen, the Lady Pioneers were able to execute most of their game plan. They attempted a season-high 61 shots, a majority of which were the quality shots Novak wanted, made 23 trips to the free-throw line and defensively held a team that averages 60.2 per game to 46.

Now the Lady Pioneers just need to find the means to increase their offensive efficiency in order to flip these losses into wins.

"We got a lot of looks tonight [Friday] we put up 61 shots, that's the most we've ever shot. They weren't ill-advised shots, we just couldn't convert them. Credit St. Stephens, they contested those shots and bodied us up. I was really proud of our defensive effort. We went to the line 23 times, I won't tell you what we shot. We attacked them and got them into foul trouble but just couldn't convert," said Novak.

Two Lady Pioneers whose stats may not jump but did provide critical contributions to the team were junior Kinley Erickson and freshman Elizabeth Lungren.

Erickson was tasked with keeping St. Stephens Angel Redman, 1A's fifth leading rebounder at 10.3 per game, off the boards. To which she did while also pulling down 11 rebounds and scoring eight points on her own.

Novak gave Lungren the defensive assignment of Martina Brown, who is second in scoring for 1A at 17.6 points per game. Lungren held her own, especially in the half-court where she was able to limit Brown.

"I want to give kudos to Kinley Erickson, she only scored eight points but had 11 boards. She guarded Angel Redman, who is their leading rebounder, and kept her in check. Also kudos to Elizabeth Lungren she guarded Brown, Brown got 18 but 10 of those were on leak outs, but Liz did a really nice job," she said. "Typically, we have Charity Starr guard the best player but we've lost her rebounding in doing so. I gave Liz that assignment tonight and she filled it great and played it well."

This week the Lady Pioneers gear up for two road tests against conference opponents Burlington, on Friday at 5:30 p.m., and Meeteetse, Saturday at noon.