Glenbard North gets first DVC win
Glenbard North's long wait is over.
The Panthers earned their first DuPage Valley Conference victory of the season Thursday night with a 55-52 victory at West Chicago.
"It got a monkey off our back," Glenbard North coach John Chamberlain said. "We knew this game has been in them for a long time they just haven't showed it. They showed a couple of glimmers of it, couldn't finish down the stretch. We've been waiting for them to put together their best game and they did."
The Panthers (4-19, 1-9) got off to a good start and led nearly the whole game, going up as many as 8 points in the first quarter. West Chicago (13-8, 5-4) finally took its only lead of the night with 4:54 left in the game when a Jessica Baids basket made the score 44-43.
Glenbard North regained the lead for good at 50-48 with 2:12 to play when sophomore Brianna Harn made a pair of free throws. The Panthers finished 24 of 35 at the line, with senior Amoni Reynolds making 9 of 10.
"Amoni is money from there, and then Bri did a good job as well," Chamberlain said.
It was the third straight loss for the Wildcats, who find themselves falling out of the DVC race.
"We're just not playing defense right now," Wildcats coach Kim Wallner said. "That's happened the last couple of weeks. We've lost defensive intensity."
The Panthers attributed their win to finding defensive intensity.
"The difference for us was our defense," Chamberlain said. "We've been talking defense all year, and we got stops. That was huge."
"It gives us a lot of confidence," Reynolds said of the win. "We didn't have a lot of confidence toward the beginning of the year because we had a lot of freshmen and sophomores coming up. When we locked down on defense, all our confidence went up and that led to our offense, and we got easy baskets."
Reynolds scored a game-high 18 points to go with 7 rebounds, 5 blocked shots, 4 steals and 4 assists.
"Amoni has got inside-outside game," Chamberlain said. "She's our leader, and we've just been trying to get her some help. We've got a lot of young kids out there with her and they're coming into their own. She did a very nice job of settling into not doing everything but doing what she needed to do to get us over the hump. It was great to see."
Harn added 13 points.
Baids led West Chicago with 17 points and Claire Monroe added 12.