Lady Vikings receive crash course at SKC-Ronan Tourney
CHARLO HIGH School Cheyenne Nagy wrestles with a Clark Fork-Superior player for possession of the basketball Friday morning at the SKC-Ronan Tip-Off Classic Tournament. (Jason Blasco/Lake County Leader)
CHARLO HIGH School guard Destiny Manuel surveys the court and tries to find an open player in the first half of the Lady Vikings game against Clark Fork-Superior Friday morning at the Class-C Ronan-SKC Tip-Off Tournament. (Jason Blasco/Lake County Leader)
PABLO — The young Charlo Lady Vikings basketball team got some much needed experience in their two tournament games at the SKC-Ronan Class-C Tip-Off Tournament Friday and Saturday.
The Lady Vikings lost to the Clark Fork-Superior Lady Mountain Cats in the final minute of the game and fell to them 39-36 in the opening game.
Lady Vikings’ Coach Bret Thompson said he felt his team just “made too many mistakes” in the opening game of the season.
“That was a game of turnovers and we had a lot of them,” Thompson said. “A lot of scoring came on turnovers and some of those are what we created ourselves. We didn’t make it really tough for them either.”
Thompson said he felt his Lady Vikings were able to “get away” with mistakes at the conclusion of the first half.
“In the first, half we got away with it,” Thompson said. “I thought we did a good job offensively. We did well on the boards. We got second, third, and fourth opportunities to shoot but the turnovers caught up with us.”
In the loss, Sakoya Gaustad led the Lady Vikings with nine points,Tyrah Hammond had eight, Kaitlin Cox had seven, Cheyenne Nagy had five, Destiny Manuel had five, and Kenzie Couture finished with two.
In the second game, the Charlo Lady Vikings improved with a 39-28 victory over Drummond.
Thompson said the biggest area of improvement for the Lady Vikings between the first game and second was reducing the turnovers.
“The big thing was our turnovers,” Thompson said. “We didn’t have any turnovers compared to the first game. We had a third less than we did in the first game. I only had a dozen turnovers and the Superior game was close to the 30s. That is a significant difference.”
Thompson said they made their adjustments against the Lady Trojans’ size advantage.
“Drummond was tall and athletic, and I thought we weren’t very big,” Thompson said. “it took a while and we didn’t score. I thought we had some chances and missed some easy baskets but it was easy to adjust to shooting the ball better inside. In the second half, that changed a little bit.”
The other major key for the Lady Vikings was the play of Cheyenne Nagy. Nagy dropped 21 points on Drummond’s defense.
“Cheyenne had a big night and she was touching the ball just about every time down the floor,” Thompson said. “At times, the Lady Trojans didn’t let her get the ball. Offensively, they had other girls step up and make baskets. In this game, we got a few buckets. They didn’t score a bunch and our team just scored at the right times.”