St. Viator pulls away from Jacobs

First-year Jacobs girls basketball coach Keith Chuipek realizes the wins for his youthful Golden Eagles will be hard to come by early in the 2010-2011 season.

So, Chuipek is hoping for improvement each game.

He was happy with Jacobs’ play, despite the Golden Eagles’ 52-31 loss to St. Viator in action at the Dundee-Crown Thanksgiving Tournament Friday night in Carpentersville.

“It will be baby steps for us,” said Chuipek. “We played better tonight than we did in our opener against Grayslake Central. We have such an inexperienced team. By conference time we hope to have a pretty good team.”

St. Viator led just 10-7 at halftime, but the Lions blitzed the Eagles 24-10 in the third quarter to take a 34-17 advantage heading into the final 8 minutes. Forcing 9 Jacobs turnovers, St. Viator converted 11 of 15 from the field in the third quarter. The raging Lions made 7 layups off 7 Golden Eagle turnovers.

Taylor Skala led the Lions with 8 third-quarter points.

“We told the kids at halftime to play with more aggressiveness,” said St. Viator coach Paul Bjerkness. “We did both very well in second half. We executed our press and got deflections and easy baskets. Our defensive effort was good the whole game.”

Skala and Mallory Hess paced the Lions (1-0) with 10 points each. Melanie Schwerdtmann led Jacobs with 15 while Jessica Tennant scored 10.