Snowball effect helps WW South blitz Lake Park
This year's Wheaton Warrenville South team is going through some growing pains early on, but even last year's powerhouse squad would be hard pressed to improve on the Tigers' second-quarter effort Tuesday night.
After visiting Lake Park jumped ahead 17-10 and led 17-12 after one quarter, the Tigers blitzed the visitors with a 19-0 run in the second quarter, dominating play on both ends of the floor. The hosts then followed that up with a 10-4 edge in the second quarter to take a 42-21 lead into the final eight minutes of play and eventually coast to a 56-36 DuPage Valley Conference victory.
Wheaton Warrenville South (3-8, 1-1) forced 10 Lancers turnovers in the second quarter, picked up 3-pointers from Erin Madigan and Jayne LaBelle and used strong rebounding and defense to blank Lake Park and turn the game around.
"Defense controls everything, and we've been working on doing a better job defensively and when you play really good defense it sort of sparks your offense a little bit," Tigers coach Rob Kroehnke said. "That's sort of what happened there in the second quarter."
Tigers forward Olivia Linebarger, a senior leader who played a key role on last year's star-studded team, led all scorers with 16 points and also added 3 steals. She said the team has suffered a few too many slow starts this season but was happy with the way things turned in the Tigers' favor after switching to a more aggressive zone defense.
"Unfortunately this has kind of been a recurring theme; us starting down," she said. "Whether it's due to mental errors or physical errors … but we switched up our defense and we started going three up. That gets us going in practice and kind of running around. We kind of switched up on them and took over the momentum."
The Lancers (4-6, 0-2) started fast behind 8 quick points from Emily Duckhorn, who drained a pair of 3-pointers, and five free throws from Jennifer Warfield, who tallied 9 of her 11 points in the first quarter.
"Being down 17-10, it's not panic time yet, but you better figure something out quick," Kroehnke said. "We came up with some adjustments and the kids started executing better."
While the Tigers were putting together their best quarter in quite some time, Lake Park was playing one of its poorest. With those two situations occurring, things just snowballed away from the Lancers.
"We knew they were going to come and trap us with pressure and we didn't handle it very well," Lake Park coach Brian Rupp said. "We talk about the snowball. We were throwing the ball out of bounds, we weren't catching the ball. We were getting ourselves literally put into traps. It was probably our worst quarter of the year."
The Tigers also scored their share of second chance points after recording an 18-5 edge on offensive rebounds. Ellen Anderson did a lot of the dirty work down low, finishing with 7 points, 7 rebounds and 3 assists.
After the strong start Lake Park managed just four points in the second the third quarters combined and did not attempt a free throw after the first quarter.
"To their credit it was a very bad game for us," Rupp added. "You score four points in two quarters and that's not going to do it for you. Again it's that snowball. It got too big."