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Buckets hard to come by for SH girls in loss to Tigers

JEWELL – Watch it. Learn from it. And then burn it.

In a nutshell, that’s what the South Hamilton girls’ basketball players and head coach Tony Woodall should do with the videotape of Friday’s second-half meltdown that produced a 55-16 loss to Heart of Iowa Conference rival Gilbert on Coach Jim Marsh Court.

Woodall knows he has a work in progress project on his hands and he says improvement is on the way if his players try to look towards the future rather than think about the past.

“We need to mature up and we’ll get there,” Woodall said after a lengthy postgame meeting with his players. “We’re going to keep working and we’re not going to give up. That can be hard after a game like this because this isn’t what I expected us to do.

“We’re going back to some of our old ways … old habits die hard.”

What was competitive for the majority of the first quarter turned into anything but by the halftime break, as an 18-8 second-quarter spurt by Gilbert (4-2, 4-1 HOIC) pushed its advantage to 16 points, 30-14.

And it only went downhill from there for South Hamilton (1-4, 1-4 HOIC), which dropped its second straight contest.

The Hawks were shutout in the third quarter and failed to make a shot from the field over the final 16 minutes. Their only second-half points came on a pair of free throws by Kali Lucas with 6:29 remaining in the final period.

The invisible lid over the Hawks’ basket all night led to a 5 for 30 (16 percent) shooting performance.

Woodall says one of the big issues his players need to overcome is letting mistakes affect other areas of the game.

“We’ve got to battle through the one or two mistakes that we make and not let them bother us. That’s what we need to keep working on,” he said. “We can play better with (Gilbert) than we did. I know we can.”

Paige Hoiberg led the Tigers with 20 points, eight coming during the third quarter that saw her team outscore South Hamilton 23-0. She knocked down three 3-pointers in the contest.

Inside presence Ellen Sneller finished with 10 points for the winners, while fellow paint players Elise Powers and Jane Brown added eight each.

South Hamilton received five points from Allyson Ervin and four from both Lucas and Savana Stangeland. Diana Garcia rained in the Hawks’ lone 3-pointer.

Stangeland scored all of her points during the game’s initial 7 minutes; a pair of free throws cut Gilbert’s early lead to 10-6, but the Tigers scored the next eight points before Ervin could end the spurt with a free throw. But the energy Ervin brought to both ends of the floor led to foul trouble; she exited with three fouls at the 4:51 mark of the second quarter and then picked up her fourth and fifth fouls in the second half.

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