Friday the 13th proved unlucky for the Red Devil women’s basketball team against Pratt Community College.
The Beavers were able to jump out to a 41-19 first half lead and cruised to a 71-54 win.
Allen Community College coach Todd Buchanan was very frustrated with his team’s performance.
“We are double-digits in shooting air balls,” Buchanan said. “A college basketball team is in double digits in not even hitting the rim… I would feel guilty if we weren’t shooting every single day and we have even gone back to pre-practice form-shooting stuff… How we have gotten from the Dodge City win until now, I have no answer.”
At one point in the first half, Buchanan was compelled to play a five-guard lineup with his five smallest players Tamera Shaver, Chelsey Trautloff, Kendra Houston, Kamri Summons and Katelyn Swanson in an effort to create some sort of spark.
“We were down,” Buchanan said. “So I was trying to put a huge band-aid on it all at once. We get all our shooters on the floor at the same time, we are smaller so we should be able to play more man defense and then we can press. We had some spurts with that, but we just kept turning the ball over.”
The loss is especially painful because Pratt has struggled mightily this season and entered the game with a 3-13 record overall and 2-10 in the Jayhawk Conference.
Allen falls to 5-12 this season with a 4-9 conference mark.
The Red Devils only shot 31 percent from the field and only one player shot over 50 percent percentage.
That player was Tamera Shaver, who led the team with 14 points on 5-of-9 shooting.
Shaver has been a coach on the floor for the Red Devils and repeatedly got her teammates in the right spot on Friday when they weren’t lined up correctly.
“Tamera does a great job of being our voice,” Buchanan said. “She is our orchestrator out there.”
Buchanan said that it has been difficult with such a young team to install all his offensive packages.
“I’ve got another probably 30 sets of quick-hitters and stuff that we could run,” Buchanan said of his team’s struggles with learning the offense. “We have struggled, but their basketball I.Q. isn’t terrible.”
The bottom line is simple.
“There are no excuses,” Buchanan said. “There is no reason for us ever to play the way we did today.”
Beavers roll past Red Devils
