By Drew Terhall

DailyAdvocate.com

VERSAILLES — It was a tale of two halves for the Versailles High School girls basketball team on Jan. 5. Going up against the 10-1 Parkway Lady Panthers, they were down 17-15 at halftime.

But, the offense stalled in the second half and Parkway came away victorious with a 44-26 win.

Head coach Tracy White said the offense couldn’t get into a rhythm during the game. The team didn’t seem to be on the same page for most of the game.

“When we’re going one player going at it one-on-one, everybody else is standing and watching. There’s no rhythm, no routine, there’s no set play. There is nothing there,” White said. “It’s hard to beat a good team when you’re going one-on-one and you’re not running plays.”

The first half saw both teams matching each other on the same ends of the court. Versailles would go down and have a small scoring stretch. Parkway would then start to make some baskets.

On defense, the Lady Tigers would force some turnovers and limit second chance opportunities. The Lady Panthers would respond by holding Versailles scoreless through stretches of the first half.

White said the team, on offense and defense, was communicating well in the first half and was crashing the boards for rebounds.

That stopped in the second half. Parkway started to separate themselves in the second half. They held Versailles to 11 second half points and started to get into a groove on offense.

Versailles couldn’t keep up with the scoring of the Lady Panthers. White said they practiced going up against the many defenses Parkway was going to throw at them and it just didn’t translate to the game. They didn’t have the same pieces as they did in their last game against Botkins.

“For some reason, whatever it was, we didn’t have a lot of the girls looking to score and setting good screens and running hard cuts. I felt like, I don’t know, we played scared,” White said.

The Lady Tigers had only three players register a point in this game. Junior Jenna Dirksen had 15 points in the game. She had ten points at halftime. Junior Allison Schwartz had six points and freshman Katey Litten had five points.

It was a bump in the road offensively for the Tigers. White said they were starting to click on offense the last few games, but took a step backwards in this game.

Versailles is now 5-7 with a 3-2 conference record. They take on Jackson Center on Jan. 7 on the road next. White hopes to see a better showing from her team as they continue to show the improvements they have made so far this season.

“We got to prove that we can do it. We say it, we work in practice, we take steps forward and then we want to let ourselves take steps backward. We got to figure it out and we got to figure it out now if we want to be good,” White said.

Contact Daily Advocate sports editor Drew Terhall at [email protected]