LE ROY — The Southern Coffey County Titans suited up 14 girls in their season-opening game against the Crest Lancers Thursday night. They had substitutes galore, fresh legs running up and down their bench. Crest? Crest didn’t need a bench. Crest needed a chair. The Lancers, in managing to find only six girls on the Colony campus interested in dribbling a basketball, had the luxury of only a single substitute on the night.
The final score, then — especially when you add in the contributions of Titan sharp-shooter Erikah Lyons and the dominant play of her soft-handed cohorts in the post — reflected the imbalance: The Titans trounced the Lancers 44-27.
But what the score doesn’t reflect is the level of moxie running through this short-staffed band of Lancers.
“Honestly, I thought we did a lot better than what anyone expected of us,” said first-year coach Megan Mason after the game. “Conditioning-wise, I wasn’t sure where we would be. But I was pleased — they stuck through it.”
One’s whole approach to coaching changes when you’re in charge of a basketball team that mounts fewer players than a typical woodwind section: Pulmonary fitness is all. “We’ve been doing a lot of running, a lot of conditioning,” continued Mason, shifting her infant daughter from one arm to the other. “We’re working on getting these girls to be able to last a whole game.”
The Lancers did more than last; they ran themselves red in the face in their bid to dictate the speed of the contest right through the end of the fourth quarter. Junior Regan Godderz, the heart of the Lancer’s offense, drained two threes in the game’s final minutes and consistently beat her opponents up and down the floor. Godderz finished with 15 points and was the night’s leading scorer. Classmate Camryn Strickler, whose much-improved inside-out game will make her a tough one to guard this season, added six points. Jewel Armstrong deposited two. Coach Mason again: “Someone that really surprised me was Aubree Holloran, our freshman. She was nervous at the beginning but after that she attacked the ball very well. She really surprised me with how aggressive she could be.” Holloran posted four points to her team’s tally.
But it wasn’t on account of Crest’s deficiencies that the Titans advanced. The team from Le Roy earned their victory by sweat and talent. They’re versatile, they take care of the ball, they pass well, and they have in senior guard Erikah Lyons a player with tremendous court sense and a flair for finding the bottom of the bucket. Lyons ended the night with 14 points. Post players Crystal Alumbaugh, Haven Harvey and Danielle Kasprzak — each of whose ponytails brush up against the six-foot mark — combined for 20.
Next week is tournament time. The Titans are off to Yates Center. Crest heads south to Humboldt.
There’s a style of drubbing — on view, primarily, inside the turnbuckles of a boxing ring — in which the interest the viewer takes in the fight is swiftly replaced by a concern for the health of the poor soul on the wrong end of the pummeling. Such was the worry for fans of the Crest Lancers boys basketball team on Thursday night. Southern Coffey County opened with a barrage that left the Lancers on the measly side of a 13-2 scorecard at the end of the first quarter.
And though the Titans would go on to beat Crest by 21 — 50-29 — the Lancers didn’t go down without a fight.
Maybe it was the stem-winder that Coach Travis Hermreck delivered his guys at the end of the quarter. Or maybe, after taking clout after clout, the boys had simply reached their absorptive capacity. Either way, at the start of the second quarter — realizing that they, too, had fists dangling from the ends of their arms — the boys from Colony punched back.
The revival was led by the Lancer’s lanky phenom, Hayden Hermreck, who deposited nine second-quarter points, including a key three in the final seconds of the first half.
“You know what,” reflected a post-game Coach Hermreck, “we competed. I’m happy for that. And I was really proud of the fact that, although we couldn’t buy a bucket in the first quarter, we fought back. We had it cut to six at halftime. And then we came out in the second half and we competed again.”
Still, the Titans would go on to outscore the Lancers 25-10 in the second half. The hyper-athletic Chonnor Ludolph contributed seven points to his team’s win. Junior Kolgan Ohl added 16. The team’s leading scorer, however, was the very dominant Dawson Leimkuhler. You want a Leimkuhler on your team. Anyone would. The junior has as sturdy a frame as you’ll find on any high schooler — actually, someone should really check his ID — and a swiftness of foot, to boot. He dropped 17 on the Lancers.
