Old rivals collide on the basketball court once again tonight when the Washington Demons host the Mid-Prairie Golden Hawks in a doubleheader you can here on KCII.
Both teams come into the girls’ game with a record of 8-7. Washington snapped a skid of back-to-back losses with a victory Friday at Mount Pleasant. Even without leading scorer Adalyn Long, the Demons have been able to lean on a stingy defense that gives up only about 45 points per game. Washington head coach Shannon Rugg tells KCII Sports that everyone has stepped up in the absence of their sophomore star.
“I think Kendall Hinrichsen moving over to the point guard has done a good job,” Rugg says. “Lauren Hinrichsen has really helped bring the ball down more now. Addison Miller and Oaklee Sobaski come in and play solid minutes for us. Jacey Berg, Taylor Bartholomew and Maci Williams, that group is really starting to kind of understand and figure things out.
Mid-Prairie will try to get their fourth straight win in the series against Washington and, in turn, end a stretch of back-to-back defeats coming in, including the one-point loss Friday to Wilton.
Junior Callie Huber has led the Golden Hawks by putting up almost 11 points and nine rebounds per game, while sophomore guard Jovi Evans has also been a force for the Hawks by putting up nearly 10-and-a-half points and three assists per contest. Head coach Danny Hershberger says that his team has offensive firepower, but they need to play smart when they have the basketball.
“On offense,” Hershberger says, “we’ve to be a little bit better at being patient with the basketball and not letting the other team speed us up. There’s times that it looks like we predetermine where we’re going with the ball, and we throw it there whether it’s open or not. We’ve got to do a little bit better job of seeing what the defense is trying to do and finding who’s open.”
In the boys’ game, Washington will try to bounce back from back-to-back losses and improve on their 6-8 record. While sophomore Drew Conrad and junior Logan McDole have paced a solid offense by combining to score almost 25 points a game, Demons head coach Collin Stark says his young team is still trying to figure out how to string wins together.
“We’re going to continue to have to learn [about] how do we play with a tight game down the stretch,” Stark says. “When you look at making sure we’re taking care of the ball [and] making sure that we’re communicating on the defensive end, those little detail things, especially in that fourth quarter, I think it’s going to be the difference between winning and losing down the stretch.”
A loss on Friday means Mid-Prairie has dropped four of their last six games. The 6-7 Golden Hawks have piled up the points behind sophomore Bryce Henry and juniors Brady Weber and Ace Peck, who are combined scoring almost 37 points per game. Head coach Daren Lambert says the Hawks’ success rests on executing their game plan at all costs.
“That no-other-choice mentality has to start from the tip,” Lambert says. “We know what we have to do. It just has to be a mentality that we have to do it.”
The Demons have won nine of the last 10 games against the Golden Hawks. You can hear both battles between Washington and Mid-Prairie this evening on all KCII stations and streaming on KCIIradio.com and the KCII and KCII2 apps.