Girls basketball: Bench steps up vs. South

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A Rosemount player signals for the ball.

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Playing through a few key injuries this season, the Rosemount girls basketball team has needed total team efforts to pull out wins.

Finally healthy, the Irish were still relying on team depth in a win last week against Lakeville South, stopping a stretch of back-to-back losses. Rosemount lost its next game, 75-33 against Bloomington Kennedy, but Irish coach Sam McDonald certainly saw signs of progress against Lakeville South.

Last year’s leading scorer and rebounder, Elaine Warner, was playing in her second game and the Rosemount starters led the team to a quick lead. However, McDonald knew his team’s reserves would play a big role.

As they have at different times this season, the Irish received quality production from the bench in the 70-55 win against Lakeville South.

“We came out of the chute right away and played really, really well,” McDonald said. “I was proud of that, but the other part I was happy about was we overcame a lot of foul trouble in the first half. We ended up sitting most of our starters with foul trouble with a good six or seven minutes left in the half and I was just really happy with our second group that was in there. They extended the lead to 15 at halftime when it was down to six at one point at a part of the game that could have been a real difficult piece for us.”

McDonald credited starter Laura Bodurtha and reserves Hannah Halterman, Meghan Schuster and Hannah Grim with keeping the Rosemount lead intact. Bodurtha finished with 12 points, making 7 of 8 free throws.

“She upped her game a little bit, with the scoring and ball handling piece,” McDonald said. “I thought they all did a nice job with that as well.”

Rachel Hoeppner had 16 points and Warner added 13 points and seven rebounds.

Lindy Parker had eight points, four rebounds and six assists, while Brooke Stevens added four points, five rebounds, five steals and six assists for the Irish (7-7, 2-4 South Suburban).

“It was a real nice win for us,” McDonald said. “We played a really good game overall, right from the get-go, as a team and a lot of kids stepped up throughout the game to help us secure a victory there.”

It was a different story against Bloomington Kennedy.

The Eagles led 16-0 early on the way to a 47-15 halftime advantage in a game in which Rosemount never offered a challenge.

“They just came out guns a blazing and we played very poorly defensively and rebounding,” McDonald said. “It was probably our longest night of the season.”

It’s an occurrence that McDonald has seen a bit too often this season.

“I’ve been very happy with their play, when we are running our stuff and playing hard,” McDonald said. “If we do that and come up short, you can live with that. But every once in a while, we have games where we don’t play anywhere near our potential, where we don’t play anywhere near the defense we could or should, and we really pay for it on the scoreboard. We’re working on that to get better.”

Warner had a team-high 11 points in the loss against Kennedy, but the Irish shot 22.6 percent from the field as a team.

Rosemount plays at Eagan tomorrow and plays host to Burnsville on Tuesday, Jan. 25.

Tags: girls basketball, sports, rosemount, irish, prep