By Drew Terhall

Dailyadvocate.com

GREENVILLE — On senior day, the Lady Wave basketball team ends their regular season with a 43-30 home win over Piqua on Feb. 10.

Head coach Rachel Kerns said it was great for the team to end their rough stretch from the past month and get a win for the seniors. It was also a reminder that the team has kept their head down and worked through their struggles.

“It was a fun senior day game to play today. Really credit to our girls because we had a rough January into February here. It just goes to show we haven’t quit yet,” Kerns said.

It was a streaky start to the game. Greenville got up 5-0 before Piqua responded with a 10-0 run. The Lady Wave was able to get back the lead late in the quarter and led 11-10 after the first.

Kerns said the offense just needed to spread the ball out after Piqua made that run. The Lady Indians were running a defense the Lady Wave has not seen yet this season.

Once they were able to spread it out and got junior Brooke Schmidt on the high post, they started to produce offensively.

The defense also started to lock in. Kerns said while sophomore Jayda Lyons had another great day defensively, everyone executed the game plan. They were going to force Piqua’s non-shooters to beat them from the outside.

“Our whole goal today was, Piqua is coming in and they’ve been playing really good basketball. We wanted to make their non-shooters have to shoot and the girls did a great job knowing who to cover and when to leave people open,” Kerns said.

Greenville led 20-14 at halftime. Piqua came out of halftime with a new found intensity. They were trapping the ball handlers once they crossed half court and being physical with whoever had the ball.

That led to Piqua getting into foul trouble early. With five minutes left, Piqua already had five team fouls. From that point, every Piqua foul turned into two free throws for Greenville.

While Greenville didn’t capitalize on most of those opportunities, they were able to take advantage of Piqua being a bit more passive with their five fouls.

The team was able to crash the boards and get second chance points. The defense continued to get stops and turnovers. All while the offense didn’t turn over the ball against the on ball pressure from Piqua.

“We did a great job handling the ball. They just committed so many fouls in that third quarter, we got to the free throw line. We really could have blown the game open had we actually made a few free throws,” Kerns said. “But the fact that we got there, we were handling the ball which was great.”

Greenville led 32-19 after the third quarter. The team continued to roll offensively and defensively to secure the double-digit win.

Kerns said this game showed the growth some of the players have made with junior Megan Lind being out for the past month. The more minutes some of the players got helped them improve and has helped the team.

Senior Jaydn Norris, Ella McLear and Ava Loudy were all honored prior to the game. Kerns said McLear couldn’t be medically cleared to play this season but still wanted to be around the program. Kerns is thankful to have McLear around and admires the dedication she has for the program.

Norris was a player that player JV her freshman year but didn’t play the next two years. She then had an injury and was out for about a month. Kerns said while it would have been great to have Norris for all four years, she was happy to have her on the team and see her get some minutes in this game.

Loudy got the start in the game and is a player that executes her role on the team. Kerns said Loudy is the team mom as she makes sure everything is organized and everyone knows where they’re supposed to be. Kerns also said she will miss Loudy more than Loudy may realize.

Freshman Megan Loudy led with 12 points. Schmidt had nine points and junior Maddie Hutchens had eight points.

Greenville finishes the season with a 6-16 record and a 3-15 MVL record. They will start tournament play on Feb. 17 at Tecumseh. As the 16th seed, they will take on the sixth seed Thurgood Marshall with tip off set for noon.

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