Girls Basketball: Central puts away Grant Park to stay unbeaten in RVC

CLIFTON — When Central hosted Grant Park in River Valley Conference girls basketball action Monday night, not only was it the first game of the new year for both teams, but the first game for either team in almost three weeks.

While it took the Dragons nearly a half to find their footing, by then the Comets had built up quite a lead, scoring 22 of the game’s first 24 points on their way to a 52-11 win that kept their unbeaten record in RVC play. Central improved to 10-6 and 6-0 in the RVC while Grant Park slid to 3-7, 1-5.

“What I was really happy with tonight was, while we didn’t have some things where we wanted, for the most part we’ve executed everything we’ve worked on for the last two-and-a-half weeks,” Comets head coach Rebecca Swigert-Fenton said. “We’d been off since Dec. 19, so practice starts getting a little chippy, I’m getting a little chippy, we just needed a game. But it was nice to see that all of those things we put in for the second half of the season, we were able to do tonight.”

The Comets are one of two RVC teams that are perfect in conference play, as Tri-Point’s 7-0 RVC mark has the Chargers half a game ahead in the standings following Monday. After two third-place conference finishes and a runner-up finish a year ago, being atop the RVC standings by the end of the year in the Comets’ main priority.

“That’s our number-one goal in the season, to try and win the conference,” Swigert-Fenton said. “We’d like to be up for every game, but that’s our goal, to win conference, so that’s definitely on their mind.”

Senior guard Gracie Schroeder joined the Comets the same year they joined the RVC from the Sangamon Valley Conference ahead of the 2021-22 season. As a four-year starter, Schroeder said that she’s starting to see her leadership show on the court this season, and also that the team’s starting to come together just in time for the second semester.

“We’ve been working together, been putting the pieces together,” Schroeder said. “We’ve been finding each other on the court, which at the beginning of the season we didn’t. It was good to find our groove and figure out how we work with each other.”

Schroeder’s seven points Monday were third on the team, following a game0high 16 points from sophomore forward Maddie Webb and 10 points from senior forward Myah Martinez. Schroeder, Martinez and Anna Winkel are the lone seniors for a relatively young Central squad this season. Not only are those seniors once again contending for conference royalty once again, but Swigert-Fenton is also seeing them push along the new wave of Comets like Webb and fellow starting forward Alexis Prisock.

“Gracie coming in as a freshman, Anna coming in as an underclassmen and Myah too, all three of my seniors have played a ton of minutes for four years,” Swigert-Fenton said. “Not only have they put in that work, but I see them pointing things out to the new underclassmen, saying things and giving tips here and there.”

Although they struggled in their first game back from break, the Dragons did find some positives to take away from Monday. They got eight points from Abi Roberts, with Claire Sluis tallying the other three, and ended the first half going basket-for-basket with the Comets to match a 6-6 stride after the Comets’ dominant run to open the game.

“We’ll go to practice tomorrow, go over what we did wrong with passes, making some mistakes of our own, and then focus on G-SW Thursday and how we can beat them,” head coach Nancy Marcotte said.

UP NEXT

The Comets are off until they host Watseka in nonconference rivalry action at 2:30 p.m. The Dragons return home to host Gardner-South Wilmington at 5:30 p.m. Thursday.

https://daily-journal.com/sports/girls-basketball-central-puts-away-grant-park-to-stay-unbeaten-in-rvc/article_35b1162c-ccaf-11ef-86ac-1705966db5e7.html