EDWARDSVILLE – Both Metro East Lutheran and Roxana's girls basketball teams are still works in progress this early part of the season.
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For the Knights, the defensive end of the game was what helped MEL take a 42-20 win over the Shells in MEL's home opener at Hooks Gym Monday night to take the Knights to a 2-2 mark on the young season while the Shells fell to 1-5 on the year thus far.
“I thought we did a relatively good job defensively,” Stock said. “With us still learning what we're doing, I think there's still a lot of room for development yet; at the same time, I thought we let down a bit in the third quarter – I wasn't real happy with that. We've got to play all four quarters no matter what the situation is in the game defensively.
“There's some things we're going to work on, but I was pretty happy with it – we're learning and we're getting better.”
“We're playing a lot of young kids,” said Shell coach Brian Diskin. “Even the older girls we have, they don't have a lot of varsity experience; they're still learning how to score against the varsity players. We just talked about that in the locker room; we charted everything we shot tonight. Looking at it, we got a fair number of shots in both halves – more so in the first rather than the second – and we were pleased with the number of shots and the location of the shots.
“We've still got to learn how to do things like shot-fake when people get up in the air trying to block them and get to the foul line; we're not a finishing side.”
The game itself got off to a somewhat slow start, the Knights holding just a 7-4 lead at quarter time, taking the lead for the first time on a three-ball from Ellen Schulte to make it 5-4 in the late going of the period. “We got a lot of good shots; we didn't make any of them, but we got a lot of good shots,” Stock said. “I thought we missed a lot of layups today, we missed a lot of easy shots that should have gone in for us, but I think we saw some rust since not playing in over a week (the Knights did not play over Thanksgiving week after going 1-2 in an opening-week tournament in Columbia), so we have to knock that off and get going again.”
MEL got some momentum in the second quarter, pulling away from the Shells a bit to move to a 22-12 lead at the half before going on a couple of small runs in the third period to establish a 35-18 lead at three-quarter time and staying steady in the final quarter for their margin of victory.
Schulte and Sami Kasting led the way for Metro East with 10 points each, followed by six points from Destiny Williams; Lindsey Scroggins led the Shells with seven points, with Emma Lucas scoring six on the night. The Knights host Madison at 6 p.m. Thursday before hosting Nokomis at 6 p.m. Dec. 4; the Shells travel to Bunker Hill at 7:30 p.m. Thursday before beginning their South Central Conference campaign at Staunton at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 4.
