By Morgan Dinkler
Starting off the 2022-23 girls’ basketball season, the Lady Mustangs headed into their first two games with confidence against the Red Cloud Warriors and the Deshler Dragons. Taking on the Warriors, the ladies came out in the first quarter out-scoring their opponents 21-18. Going into halftime, the Lady Mustangs were still up 39-36. In the third quarter, they started to fall behind, only managing to put up four points in the third quarter. At the end of the third, the Mustangs were down 43-47 but still had the fourth quarter to try to catch up. Going into the fourth quarter the Mustangs were really putting up a fight. The girls were scoring better this quarter but couldn’t quite top what the Warriors put up. The Lady Mustangs ran out of time with the final score of 54-62. Senior Georgi tenBensel and sophomore Emma Schmidt led the team offensively scoring 21 and 14 points, respectively. Freshman MaKenna Karr led the team with five offensive rebounds. Senior Brooklyn Meyer and sophomore Katy Soucek both had three defensive rebounds. First-year head coach Kate Sinsel said, “For the first game of the season, I was proud of the girls for how well they executed our press and our offensive sets. Looking forward, we need to be able to put together four full quarters of basketball.”
After a hard loss at Red Cloud, the Mustangs decided to put it behind them and move on to their next game. On December 2nd, the Lady Mustangs traveled to Deshler for their second game of the season. To start off the game the Mustangs came out strong with a big lead. At the end of the first quarter, the Mustangs were up 12-2. Going into the second, the girls were still up, 20-12, but the dragons were slowly catching up. The girls didn’t come out of halftime quite as strong, only scoring six points to the Dragon’s eight, but the Mustangs were still up 26-20. In the fourth quarter, the Dragon’s defense was better which made it harder to score for the Mustangs. This time the girls fell behind and the Dragons took the game with a final score of 28-32. Soucek led the team in points scoring eight points and tenBensel followed scoring six. Soucek commented, “Even though we lost this game, playing harder teams reminds us about the aspects of the game that we need to work on.”