BETHALTO - It's been a rollercoaster of a season for the Civic Memorial High School girl's basketball team. Facing an extremely tough schedule that featured three mid-season tournaments they find themselves with one game left before the postseason begins.
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CM will host the No. 1 seed in their regional Highland Thursday at 6 p.m. for Senior Night before facing Waterloo, a team that has beaten them twice this regular season, in the Regional Semifinals on Monday, Feb. 13 at 7:30 p.m. in Highland.
Sitting at 13-17 on the season after a 40-34 loss to Mater Dei Monday night, the Eagles aren't giving in.
"Hasn't been easy all year," CM head coach Mike Arbuthnot said after the loss to the Knights. "It's just one of those things. We just have to stay the course and the tide can turn. Starting on Saturday, everybody is 0-0."
This will be a [regular] season we'll want to put in the rear-view mirror," he said.
"Things didn't go our way on a lot of accounts from injuries to sicknesses, but we're still here, we're still trying to compete."
Mater Dei (19-7) is a tough team to beat and one that can attack in multiple different ways. Coach Arb was pleased with his team's defense against the Knights.
"Defensively I thought our effort was good. We did as good a job as we could on the six-five girl [Alyssa Koerkenmeier]. We just didn't make shots."
His team shot the ball well in the first quarter, but then the threes just stopped falling for the Eagles.
"We couldn't throw it in the ocean. We had good shots, we had decent shots. We had the right people shooting them. Aubree Wallace had four shots tonight that were three-quarters of the way down and popped out. It's just what we're going through."
"There's a lot of aspects that we did well, we just didn't make shots."
Thanks to the Durbin sisters' combined five threes in the first quarter, CM was up 19-12. Senior Olivia opened the game with back-to-back threes and then little sister Marlee drained a couple of shots from distance to keep up the pace.
The Durbin sisters led their team in scoring. Olivia had 13 while Marlee scored 12. Wallace added seven for CM.
The Knights outscored CM 8-6 in the second quarter but still trailed 25-20 at the half.
Coming back onto the court the Knights went to their height advantage in Koerkenmeier. She scored eight of her team-high 14 points in the third quarter as she helped her team claw back. The Knights still trailed 30-27 after three.
Koerkenmeier tied the game at 30 before CM led again at 32-30. The Knights scored back-to-back buckets to regain the lead before Wallace tied the game back up at 34.
But it was once again Koerkenmeier with two scores in a row and then some helping free throws to put the game away at 40-34.
Lily Butler was the only other Knight in double digits with 11 points in the relatively low-scoring affair.
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