Seneca, Serena girls basketball teams improve to 2-0

SENECA — The second night of the Falcon-Irish Thanksgiving Tournament on Tuesday saw all four girls basketball squads play understandably better than they did in their season openers.

In the end Serena and Seneca both used quick starts with tough defense against Herscher and Streator respectively to improve to 2-0 on the early campaign.

Pool play takes a day off before returning Thursday with the Huskers taking on the Fighting Irish at 5:30 p.m. and the Bulldogs battling the Tigers at 7 p.m. The action will then switch to Flanagan-Cornell High School on Saturday for place games.

Serena 41, Herscher 16

Serena pushed out a 9-4 lead after the opening quarter, then broke the game open with a 12-2 second quarter surge — including a trio of baskets from Macy Mahler — with five of the six baskets in the period coming directly off forced turnovers to hold a 21-6 advantage at the intermission.

“We talked coming into tonight of being better defensively and pushing the ball up the floor better than we did on Monday,” Serena coach Jim Jobst said. “I felt like we did that as we had a lot of tips and steals, then especially in the second quarter, really did a good job of turning those into points in transition. That’s what we want to do, get the ball and go.

“Macy had a great overall game for us. Other than the scoring, she made a couple of really great passes that led to baskets, she defended well and really was just all over the court.”

The Huskers pushed the lead to 34-12 after three quarters.

Mahler finished with a game-high 14 points, six rebounds and three assists while Jenna Setchell added eight points, four assists and three steals.

“I feel like from (Monday’s game) to today’s game I made better decisions,” Mahler said. “I made passes when I needed to, and I shot the ball when I was open. I thought, like coach said, we did a better job in a few of the things that we maybe didn’t do as well from our first game.

“I’m sometimes on the perimeter and sometimes in the post, but which ever it is I want to make sure I first taking care of the ball but mostly getting the ball to my teammates when there open. I thought we all did a pretty good job with that tonight.”

Seneca 54, Streator 16

The Fighting Irish scored the contest’s opening 14 points and led 20-3 after the opening eight minutes, 38-8 at halftime and 47-11 heading to the fourth.

Aubrie Jackson paced Seneca with 10 points, Alyssa Zellers and Lainie Olson added seven points each, while Evelyn O’Connor, Graysen Provance and Tessa Krull chipped in five points apiece.

“We’d only really had four practices with everyone available, so (Monday) night was about everyone getting out on the floor and getting the jitters out of the way,” Seneca coach Josh Myers. “We were a little sloppy and out of control at times.

“Tonight, I felt like our defensive energy was good and we made the layups off transition that we missed in our opening game. We want to be able to score points off our defensive effort and we did a pretty good job in that aspect tonight. That said, I also thought our half-court defense was pretty good as well. Offensively in the half court we did a good job of finding the opening shooters and those shooters were able to knock down shots at a pretty good percentage.”

The Bulldogs were paced by four 3-pointers and a game-best 12 points from Ava Gwaltney with Isabel Gutierrez and Maddy Martin each recording a basket.

“We had a ton of first-game jitters (on Monday) and we didn’t handle pressure defense very well,” Streator coach Jacob Durdan said. “I felt like we did a much better job of handling Seneca’s full-court press, it wasn’t great or where it needs to be, but it was better. We talked since the first day of practice that we need to have multiple players be able to handle the ball in tough spots like against a press.

“There were times where we did some really good things, the right things, whether it was making the right read and getting the ball to someone in open space. Our big thing is having confidence, which sometimes we lack, but all of the girls are getting better at forgetting a bad play and moving on. Tonight was better than Monday and hopefully Thursday will be better than tonight, that’s the goal as the season moves along.”