EHS girls beat Mounties, fall to Eagles
The roller coaster ride that is Emmaus girls basketball continued with a 68-31 loss to the Nazareth Blue Eagles, widely considered to be one of the best teams in the area. The loss dropped the Lady Hornets to 2-3 on the season as they keep searching for back-to-back wins on the year.
"You know that they're going to throw a 1-3-1 at you every single year and the four seniors that they have were doing it as sophomores and they're still doing it," said Emmaus head coach Jeff Williams. "You know it's coming, but they just execute it so well. They read defense better than any team I've ever seen. I said it early in the season, if I'm picking someone to win the EPC, I'm picking Nazareth."
As good as Nazareth is, Williams believes that his team didn't do much to help itself in the game, which was especially disappointing, since the Hornets played their best game of the season just three nights earlier in a 50-34 win at Stroudsburg.
"What really frustrated me today is that we did not come to play defense," said Williams. "Our help defense was poor. We were ball-watching and then we'd turn our back and we gave them easy lay-ups because we just never saw them cutting to the hoop. It's the complete opposite of what we did on Tuesday night.
"On Tuesday night, I saw us play the best 3-2 defense that we've played in a long time. In the third quarter, our starters shut a team down and outscored them 19-6 and then we couldn't stop anything tonight in the 3-2 defense."
A bright spot on the night was Kiyae White, who scored a career-high 20 points, the second time this season that she's topped her previous scoring mark in a game. She also had 16 rebounds in a game where Emmaus was easily out rebounded. Williams called White's effort the best he's ever seen from her and believes she has a legitimate shot at being an EPC First Team All-Star if she continues to play at that level.
For her part, White is simply trying to lead by example and believes that even though the team is young, it can be much better than what its shown through the first five games of the season.
"Every team has a lot of ups and downs and our goal is just to prove everybody wrong," she said. "Nobody believes in us because we're a young team, but I know we can do it. Once we tighten up, we do it in practice. I know we can do it in games," said White, who is only a sophomore.
White admitted that the up-and-down play of the team has been frustrating at times, because they simply don't bring the intensity that they show in practice onto the court in games. Williams and White both believe that one key is for the team to put the bad games behind them and just look to the next opportunity for a win.
"We're just looking forward to Tuesday; beat Northampton, that's our goal," stressed White. "We're going to put this game away and think about Tuesday and I'm going to have one of my best days that day and the team's best games that day."
After Tuesday's game at Northampton, which was played after Press deadline, the Lady Hornets will play at Kutztown University Saturday against Fleetwood in the Fleetwood Shootout.