(Oakland) The Riverside girls begin postseason play Thursday night. We’ll have the 7-14 Lady Dawgs on the air on KSOM in the first round of the regional tournament.
Despite relying on mainly underclassmen, the team has matched their highest win total since the 2017-18 season. “Defensively we continue to learn and grow and figure things out. I think we’ve felt more comfortably offensively. Seven of our nine girls are freshmen and sophomores. It’s a lot different stepping on the varsity court versus middle school or one year of JV. Very excited about not only the rest of this season, but the future.”
Head coach Mitch Rice is proud of his team’s growth this year. Thursday night they’ll meet an Audubon team that they’ve lost to twice this year by scores of 42-25 and 58-32. The Wheelers are 14-8. “They are pretty good led by their two seniors Christensen and Hermansen that are really good. We have to do a good job of shutting them down. The first time I thought we did a good job defensively to hold them to 42. The second time Hermansen got hot and kind of torched us a little bit. We have to figure out a way to slow her down and if we can do that I think that gives us a fighting chance.”
Riverside’s last time out was a 57-45 loss to Logan-Magnolia, but they played right with the Panthers for much of the game. “Finally comfortable. We’ve been shooting the ball all year and it hasn’t been going in, but Monday we had five 3’s in the first half and it looked good. Moving the ball, transition offense was there a little bit, they are finally understanding how to play together as a group and functioning on offense. I’ve been saying all year if we can get our offense to catch up to our defense it can make us pretty dangerous.”
Elly Henderson leads the team with averages of 8 points and 4 steals per game. The winner of this matchup takes on either Ankeny Christian Academy or Paton-Churdan on Tuesday.
Riverside girls coach Mitch Rice:
