BELLEVILLE - The Carrollton High School girls basketball team matched up against traditional IHSA Class 1A power Okawville Saturday afternoon in game three of the SWIC Shootout.
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It was a game that went back and forth early on, but saw the Rockets use a massive second-half run to pull away for the 46-28 win.
Blake Driskill put the game’s first points on the board, but Okawville’s Josephine Schmersahl answered back with a three-pointer for the lead. Chloe McAdams secured a basket down in the post to make it 4-3 in what would be Carrollton’s last time leading.
The Hawks called a timeout with 3:52 remaining in the first quarter. Okawville outscored Carrollton 7-2 the rest of the way to make it 10-6.
The Rockets pushed the pace in the second, widening the margin to 10 points at 16-6. Carrollton used some buckets in the post from Brooklyn Eilerman and McAdams to close the gap to five, trailing 20-15 at halftime.
“I did think we closed out the first half fairly well,” Carrollton head coach Brian Madson said. “We knew they’d go on a run, but we made one at the end to close it within five. At the start of the second half we got it down to three pretty quickly and all of a sudden the wheels fell off a little bit.”
Okawville opened the second half on a 13-2 run, capped off by Kenley Hackstadt’s triple that made it 33-17.
Okawville led 33-19 after three.
“We talked about that coming into the game, [Okawville] is going to be physical,” Madson said. “We had to match their intensity and their physicality. I knew we had the size advantage, but they came out and were a lot stronger than we were, obviously.”
It snapped a seven-game win streak for the Hawks, who most recently routed Greenfield-Northwestern 60-20 on Thursday to improve to 1-0 in the Western Illinois Valley Conference.
“Our first seven games of the season, not taking anything away from those opponents, they’re good test runs for us, but this type of game is totally different,” Madson said. “We needed this game to kind of gauge where we are and see the things we need to work on.”
“It was a good learning experience for the girls, we’ll keep battling,” Madson continued. “I told the girls they’ve got to just trust the process and trust where we’re going and learn from this.”
The Hawks were led by Blake Driskill with nine points, Hadley Lake with eight, and McAdams with seven.
Caroline Tepe led the Rockets with 14 points. Jilien Harre had 11 and Schmersahl had 10.
The Hawks are back in action on Monday, December 8 when they host Brown County for their second WIVC game of the season in what will be the first of a three-game week.
“It’s early December. We’ll take our lumps if we have too,” Madson said. “But this game definitely made us better. We’ve got a hard game on Monday, Brown County. Probably our two hardest games on the schedule, but it’s good for us. I’ll take losses in December if it means wins in late February.”
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