EDWARDSVILLE – The Metro-East Lutheran High School girl’s basketball team opened up their postseason with a 54-34 win over the visiting Madison Trojans in the Regional Quarterfinals.
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With the win, the No. 6-seeded Knights will move on to host No. 3 Carlyle in the Regional Semifinals on Monday, Feb. 13 at 7:30 p.m.
The Knights had a couple of players score in double digits Saturday afternoon. They were led by Sarah Huber’s 19 points and Kate Jose’s 14 points. Emma Lorenz scored nine and Claire Sherfy had seven.
MEL led this game the entire way and was up 13-1 after the first quarter. The Trojans had some fight in them and outscored the Knights 17-13 in the second quarter, but Metro-East Lutheran was still up 26-18 at the half.
Coming out in the second half the Knights cleaned up their defense and only allowed a couple of threes from Madison. The Knights led 42-24 after three and held on to get back to the Regional Semis for the third time in four years.
Madison, a fairly new program, hasn’t had the best season, finishing at 0-16, but the Knights still knew it wasn’t going to be a cakewalk.
“We still needed to come out and execute,” MEL head coach Rob Stock said. “There were times where we didn’t execute very well, and they put some pressure on us and we fell back into some of those old mistakes.”
“It was good to see in the second half we came out with a purpose, especially in the first couple of minutes of the third quarter and did what we needed to do to get that score pushed back up.”
Looking back, Carlyle and MEL met once this season on Jan. 11. The Knights were defeated 66-24 at home.
“Obviously we played Carlyle before and it didn’t go very well, but we’re going to come out and fight and give them everything we’ve got. That’s all I can ask of those girls,” Stock said.
Should the Knights come out on top, they will also play host to the Regional Final on Thursday, Feb. 16 at 7 p.m.
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