Girls notch lopsided win
By Dan Truttschel
Correspondent
Teams that feature size in the post really don’t concern the Big Foot girls basketball squad all that much.
The speed the Chiefs throw at the opposition can be the great neutralizer.
And that seemed to be the case in Big Foot’s opener Tuesday night, as the speedy Chiefs overwhelmed the bigger Janesville Parker squad 73-46.
Big Foot is now 1-0.
The Chiefs jumped out to a 41-28 halftime lead and never looked back. Big Foot outscored the Vikings 32-18 in the second half to put the game away.
“I think we out-performed where we would be (for a season opener),” Big Foot coach Rick Schoenbeck said. “I was hoping for a 10- or 12-point win.
“We rattled them with our defense. It is that intense of pressure. We didn’t do the full-court or three-quarter court presses. We did some half-court trapping, but we out-performed my expectations last night. We played team ball. They are fun to watch.”
Courtney Schoenbeck led the way with 26 points, including two 3-pointers, followed by Olivia Briggs with 16 and Payton Courier and Brooke Wellhausen each with eight. Zanzie Demco and Sophie Foster chipped in with seven and six points, respectively.
Both Briggs and Courier each added a 3-pointer.
Parker features a pair of 6-foot-2 post players, led by Julia Hartwig, who had 22 points in the loss, but Schoenbeck said his team’s defense dealt fairly well with the size differential.
Big Foot’s defense forced Parker into 24 turnovers.
“Our guards are so strong and fast that our ball pressure on the other team’s guards usually neutralizes the other team’s bigs,” Schoenbeck said. “(Hartwig) had a lot of putbacks, (but) after that, we shut the rest of the team down.
“That’s the type of pressure defense that sets the tone. Our girls are smart and relentless. We threw seven different defenses at them, and they didn’t know how to combat that for sure.”
And being able to have success against that kind of size could pay dividends down the road, especially when Big Foot faces Whitewater in a couple weeks.
“It was so huge for us to play a team with two 6-2 girls,” he said. “How do we defend that, how do we stop that inside with being a smaller team? That’s what we have to do against Whitewater, also.”
Big Foot is back in action tonight when it hosts Milton at 7:15 p.m.
