The Fillie basketball team knew it was in for an uphill struggle when it found out that lone returning starter and senior point guard Colbi Riley would be out with a knee injury suffered in the opening round of the Ike Cearfoss Preseason Tournament at Central Heights High School.
While her fellow teammates tried to fill her place, it proved to be too great of a task for Iola as they fell to Osawatomie 42-37 in the semi-final round of the tournament.
“When you depend on one player and you put it all in her hands, so to speak, and she’s not there we get kind of got lost,” head coach Becky Carlson said. “There wasn’t any lack of effort, it was just a whole new position for (senior Chloe Gardner and sophomore Kelsey Morrison). I’m not taking anything away from our players but they just weren’t used to it.
“It’s like when you’re playing football and you lose your quarterback and you have a running back fill in for him. It’s a tough position to replace.”
Iola hung tough early, taking an early lead before ending the first tied up at seven with the Trojans. That’s where things spiraled.
Shots stopped falling for the Fillies and started to pour in for Osawatomie as the Trojans outscored Iola 19-5 to take a 14 point lead into the half.
Coming out the half it was the same story. Osawatomie built their lead up to nearly 20 before things started to click for the Fillies.
Junior Madisyn Holloway, who hadn’t scored all day and was the second leading scoring in the Fillies win on Monday, saw two shots fall including a three and a comeback was well on the way.
That momentum continued in the fourth quarter with Iola holding the Trojans to just six points while scoring 14.
“They fought right through all of that,” Carlson said. “They didn’t give up. I looked up and we were 15 down and then I looked up again and we were seven down. They really battled.”
In the end, what held back the Fillies from making a full recovery was their free throw shooting. They were 11-23 from the line and missed nine of those in the second half.
“I complained about the officiating at the time but other than the fact that we got them in some foul trouble we just couldn’t knock anything down,” Carlson said. “As well as we ran our offense the other night, the way we looked so patience wasn’t there. We were just rattled tonight.”
The Fillies hope to have Riley back but Carlson hopes that her team can continue to use this to grow and the season progresses.
Iola wraps up tournament play on Saturday when they play West Franklin at 2:30 p.m. for third place at Central Heights.
Iola (7-5-11-14—37) (FG/3pt-FT-F-TP): Holloway 1/2-4-2-12, Carson 2/0-3-1-7, Bauer 2/0-2-1-6, Gardner 2/0-0-4-4, Morrison 1/0-2-3-3, Moore 1/0-0-0-2, Bycroft 1/0-0-1-2, TOTALS 10/2-11-13-47.
Osawatomie (7-19-17-6—42) (FG/3pt-FT-F-TP): Ballou 6/0-0-3-12, A. Lagasse 5/0-0-2-10, Booe 2/1-0-2-7, M. Lagasse 3/0-0-4-6, Seidl 1/0-1-1-3, Johnson 1/0-0-1-2, Shippy 1/0-0-5-2, Hendrickson 0/0-0-1-0. TOTALS: 19/1-1-20-42
