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LEHIGH VALLEY WEATHER

EHS girls basketball team loses third straight game

The Emmaus girls basketball team lost its third straight game over the weekend, falling to Fleetwood by a score of 45-39 in the Fleetwood Holiday Shoot-Out. The game was a microcosm of what has become a disturbing trend for the team, falling behind early in the game, only to make a late run that comes up short.

The Lady Hornets missed their first 12 shots from the field and finished the first half, hitting just 2-of-24 shots from the field and 4-of-10 foul shots, in addition to committing 11 turnovers. Even with all of those problems, the defense was good enough that it faced just an eight-point deficit at halftime.

"We missed probably eight or nine layups and just weren't connecting," said coach Jeff Williams of his team's performance early in the game. "Half the time we weren't hitting the rim. We were going away from the hoop on layups, we were trying to go around the defense instead of trying to attack them, so that was discouraging. We played good defense, we just couldn't score."

Emmaus couldn't put a hole in the deficit in the third quarter, but then mounted a fourth-quarter rally, with the team looking nothing like the one that struggled in the early part of the game. At half-time, Williams challenged someone to step up and Destanee Watkins and Kiyae White took on that challenge, scoring 21 of their combined 23 points in the second half. The real surge came over the last six minutes of the game, when Watkins and White combined for 10 points.

"The conversation we just had was, if you look at the last six minutes of the game and you play with intensity like that, you can do some damage, but we can't just turn it on," said Williams. "We turned it on against Northampton in the last four minutes and we turned it on here for the last six minutes. Well, basketball is 32 minutes."

While the loss dropped the team to 2-5 overall on the season, many of those losses were games that the team could have won with more consistent play and less mistakes. With the exception of a 37-point loss to Nazareth, the four other losses have been by a combined total of 20 points, leading Williams to believe that the team isn't far away from turning the corner, if he can find a way to get the team to provide a constant effort.

"I'm frustrated, because there's no excuse for lack of intensity," Williams lamented. "There's no excuse for not coming out and playing team basketball and the times that we've done that, we've been successful. I'm concerned about the lack of team unity on the floor, because it comes in spurts, it comes and goes, but it's not 32 minutes.

"As a coach, that's what gets to me, because I look at those games and say, 'we beat ourselves in those games.' From missed layups and turnovers, we've beaten ourselves and I said to them, if you play the way you did for the last six-minutes for 32, you're going to put teams away and that fourth quarter's not going to matter. The intensity kicks in in the fourth quarter, but now we're in a hole and it doesn't need to be that way."

The team returns to conference play against rival Parkland (3-1, 4-2) Friday night before playing at Allen (1-4, 2-4) next Tuesday. In EPC play, the Lady Hornets are 1-4 on the season.