Central spoils Highland girls home basketball debut

Coming off three games to open the season at the Centralia Tournament last weekend, the Highland girls’ basketball looked forward to finally a little home cooking as the Bulldogs hosted always-tough Breese Central in their home opener on Wednesday night.

Unfortunately, the Cougars spoiled Highland’s home season debut by hanging a 42-27 loss on the Bulldogs.

Highland, which dropped to 1-3 to start the season, has struggled to score early in the season in large part due to the loss of sophomore point guard Jordan Biercher, who sustained a broken wrist in the Bulldogs’ 43-38 season-opening loss to Centralia last Thursday.

“Playing without Jordan is kind of tough right now, she broke her wrist the first game against Centralia, so she’s out for four or five weeks,” Highland coach Clint Hamilton said. “So, trying to figure out how to play offense without her on the floor has hindered us a bit but we’ll get it figured out and we’ll get there.”

Undefeated Breese Central (4-0) hit HHs with a hard full-court man-to-man defense and pushed its way to a 13-5 lead at the end of the first quarter.

Highland chipped away at the deficit and pulled to within four down 19-15 at the halftime break.

“They played a little full-court and to man and we had opportunities to score and shots weren’t falling and defensively we did a great job only giving up 19 points,” Hamilton said.

The Cougars began to pull away with an early third-quarter run but Highland stayed within striking distance, cutting the lead seven points midway through the third quarter.

“They (Central) kind of jumped on int he first two or three minutes of the third quarter and extending it out to like eight points but we got it back to like seven points and then they made a couple of shots late in the quarter to kind of extend it back out,” Hamilton said.

Central regrouped in the fourth quarter and pulled away over the final eight minutes to claim the nonconference road win.

“Only giving up 42 (points) I’m really happy with the defensive effort,” Hamilton said.” We did a really poor job of defensive rebounding giving them second chance opportunities and that’s what kind of did us in I think but we had our chances and we just couldn’t put it in the hole tonight.”

Lauren Maas led Highland with 10 points and Larissa Taylor added 7 points.

Hamilton said that finding more offense will be the short-term priority for the Bulldogs but has not doubt they will get the offense rolling soon enough.

“That’s our big priority right now and we’ll keep working on it and we’ll get there, Hamilton said. It’s just been slow so far, these first four games and it doesn’t really matter what your record is in November, we’ve just got to get ready for February we’re just building a day at a time.”