YATES CENTER — One of the biggest hurdles for a young Yates Center High girls team has been the mental one, head coach Kevin Brown said Tuesday.
“I believe we’ll get better,” Brown said. “We have a couple of girls who are pretty darned good. But they’re putting pressure on themselves that they don’t need to.”
A slow start Tuesday put the Wildcats in a hole too deep to escape against visiting Uniontown.
The Eagles held Yates Center without a field goal until early in the second quarter, leading 16-0 at the point.
The Wildcats upped their game in the middle portions, pulling to within 13 in the second half.
But another scoring spurt by Uniontown sealed matters from there in a 37-12 victory.
The loss comes in Yates Center’s final game before the Christmas break. The Wildcats are back in action Jan. 9 at Southeast- Cherokee.
“We’ve started slowly the past several games, and when you put yourself in a hole, it makes things difficult.”
Aubrey Chambers got Yates Center in the points column when she drained a bucket early in the second quarter. Kinley Morrison and Jayda Rice followed suit later in the half.
Kamdyn Trahan’s bucket early in the third quarter pulled Yates Center to within 21-8, and dreaming of a competitive stretch run.
Uniontown had other plans. After effectively running a pick-and-roll with Addisyn Hall in the early going — and then after the Wildcats proved equally as effective at stopping with a change in defensive tactics — the Eagles began hitting from the outside.
Reese Gorman’s 3-pointer kick-started a 9-2 Eagle run stretching the rest of the third quarter to re-establish a 20-point lead, 30-10.
“They’d go on a 2-4-6-point run, and our girls were thinking ‘What can I do?’ and forget the things we’d been working on in practice,” Brown said.
He noted the Wildcats grew more effective defending the post as the game went along, first by sagging their post players closer to the basket, and then by fronting the Eagles’ interior players, preventing easy inlet passes.
“They still hit some shots, but they were from farther out,” he said. “They made that last run, and we lost our focus.”
What results is players attempting to do too much instead of staying within the framework of the offense and defense, Brown said.
