Lingle gives Lady Bucs a rude awakening
Story by Tom Milstead, tom@buffalobulletin.com
It’s never good to lose a game, but sometimes a reality check can be a good thing.
The Kaycee High School girls basketball team got caught in a trap and dropped its first conference game last week at Hulett, but for most of the season the No. 5 Lady Bucs have been the big sheep in a small pasture. Coach Laura Pierson knows the 1A east regional tournament – just two weeks away in Gillette – will be tough, but it was difficult to stress to the team just how tough it will be.
Last week, Lingle-Ft. Laramie came to Kaycee and gave the Lady Bucs a firsthand lesson on just how rough-and-tumble the east regional tournament will be.
After running through conference rival Arvada-Clearmont 56-39 Friday night, on Saturday Kaycee (15-6, 6-1) led the Lady Doggers for three and a half quarters, but a late surge by Lingle paired with an offensive collapse by the Lady Bucs doomed Kaycee to a 41-35 loss. It was their first in the Buckadome this season, but coach Laura Pierson said if the team uses the loss as a wake-up call it can actually come out in better shape for their finale with Midwest on Thursday and the regional tournament in Gillette the following weekend.
“This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but it can be if you just brush it off and say ‘no big deal’ and ‘we’ll get them next time,’” Pierson said. “It has got to be something that really stings and motivates you to do better the next time, otherwise it’s just a negative. We know that. We know that we can beat them at regionals, but we have to play much better.”
Pierson said the Lady Doggers revealed one of the Lady Bucs biggest flaws this season by covering seniors Chelsea Ullery and Megan Lund and making other players take shots. Ullery and Lund scored thirteen points each, but the rest of the team only managed to score nine points all together, seven of which were scored by junior Faith Fauber.
“They were well prepared,” Pierson said. “They had gotten film from somebody. They knew every play we ran. They didn’t have a tough game last night and we played a conference game, but we did what we had to do. We beat Arvada-Clearmont, that was more important than today, but we just didn’t play very well.
“We had a chance tonight. We just didn’t convert there at the end of the game. If we made a couple of free throws, made some shots, then the game would turn out altogether different. We’ll just continue to focus on that and just try to encourage the kids to be confident. Those other kids have to keep shooting and handle the ball and not turn it over. It’s just awareness about that is going on and what we need to accomplish down the stretch.”
For her part, Ullery said the Lingle game was proof to the team that they need to get serious about playing good basketball at the regional tournament.
“I think we’ve underestimated regionals because it has always been so easy for us,” she said. “We’ve won it easily in the past. This year it’s going to be tough. This game helped out a lot.
“I think the biggest thing will be just learning from it. We had several mistakes. They were big girls, and we don’t see very many of them in our conference. I think we have a lot to work on but we also haven’t seen them a lot before now. It was good to see them because now we know what to expect at regionals. We can learn from this.”
Pierson said the team will have to learn from it if it expects to compete in Gillette and advance to state. The challenge will be to get over it, refocus and just play good basketball.
“My hope is that it motivates the kids to work harder in practice,” Pierson said. “That isn’t a big issue. We get stuff done and we’ll just focus on Midwest this week and not worry about this game. They’ve got a couple of girls that are capable of playing good and it’s an important game for us. It is tough for us after a loss. We typically don’t bounce back and play on a high level. We’ll continue to work on defense and I think as long as we play great defense we’ll always have a chance.”
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