Montini starts with big win over Bolingbrook

Bolingbrook and Montini could have found a couple of weak teams against which to open the girls basketball season and get an easy victory. Instead they found each other.

Montini, the defending Class 3A champion, announced itself as a contender for a repeat with Monday's 62-31 victory against visiting Bolingbrook, itself just three seasons removed from its last Class 4A championship.

"It makes sense because it's going to help us," said Bolingbrook coach Chris Smith, who won two state championships as a Montini assistant coach and whose team is preparing to head to Tennessee for its Thanksgiving tournament. "I wanted to get some kind of competition and what better than to come to my old house. I always got love for Montini. This is where I started at."

The Broncos never trailed, getting out to a 7-0 lead that reached 15-4 at the end of the first quarter. They led by 20 points at halftime and peaked at 38 in the fourth quarter.

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," Montini coach Jason Nichols said. "We're really young. We're going to have to get better. We're going to lose to older, more experienced teams. But we'll learn from it and hopefully we'll be better for it."

Both teams were missing a key post player. Bolingbrook was without 6-foot-3 senior Parris Bryant, and 6-foot Rainey Kuykendall sat out for Montini.

"We're still looking for combinations, still looking for the right fit," Smith said. "It hurt not having Parris out there today."

Montini made 9 of 15 3-point shots, easing the pressure on promising freshman centers Lindsey Jarosinski and Aaliyah Patty.

"We are a shooting team," Montini junior guard Lea Kerstein said with a laugh. "We're all kind of small. When it is off, though, we have to drive and we have to get it to our posts. We have Lindsey who is 6-4, and she's in there for a reason. We have to use her and Aaliyah. They're there, and we need to use them more often. But if the shot is falling, we need to shoot it."

The Broncos (1-0) forced 25 turnovers, 11 in the first quarter, and held the Raiders (0-1) to 24 percent shooting for the game.

"We have to be very active, and I think we were pretty active tonight," Kerstein added. "Our hands always have to be up. We're small guards. I'm small, the other guards, Claudia (Kunzer) is small, we're all small, so we have to play with our hands up. If we get our hands up and we are getting tips and deflections, I think we're just fine."

"Overall we did good, we did pretty good for the first game," Nichols said. "It's good to get your feet wet. We did a lot of things wrong that we know about internally and we'll fix it. We're excited about our team. I think that we can be good."