North Platte girls’ loss looks familiar
Joe Loudon
Citizen Reporter
The ball lingered on the rim and... and... and... slipped off the iron, dropping to the floor as the buzzer blared to end the game. That last-second shot the North Platte girls missed from point-blank range really wouldn’t have mattered.
But add up their other misfires from in close — the more than a dozen lay-ups they failed to convert — and, collectively, all those points the Lady Panthers left off the scoreboard mattered a whole lot as they lost their home tournament’s championship contest, 49-40, to Jefferson last Saturday afternoon. Seeing his team struggle to tally 12 second-half points gave North Platte coach Karl Matt déjá vu.
In last year’s North Platte Tournament final, the Lady Panthers mustered just 14 points in each half as they fell to Jefferson 46-28. Both teams were en route to the 2011 State Final Four, with North Platte advancing in Class 2 and, for the third straight season, Jefferson’s Eagles in Class 1. “This was very similar to last year’s game,” Matt said, “in that we got to the fourth quarter and just couldn’t score.”
Forty-two seconds into last Saturday’s fourth quarter, North Platte all-stater Emilee Buckler hit a free throw that gave North Platte a brief 36-35 lead. The Lady Panthers wouldn’t score again until Buckler got free under the basket to cut a double-digit Jefferson lead to 47-38 with 39.2 seconds left to be played.
“We executed on offense, and we executed on defense,” Matt said. “I felt we outplayed them, actually. We just didn’t make our shots. A lot of missed one-footers and too many missed free throws were the difference in the game.”
North Platte missed 10-of-19 free throws. Jefferson made 17-of- 24. The Eagles’ all-stater, Kendle Schieber, led all scorers with 31 points. Buckler, meanwhile, netted 28 points to go with three blocked shots. She scored North Platte’s first 14 points and finished the first-half with 19 points as Jefferson led 28-27 at the break.
“She’s a great, great player,” Jefferson coach Tyler Pederson said of Buckler. “We put three players on her, sometimes four, and concentrated on getting help defensively whenever she had the ball, and she still had... What? Twenty-eight!”
“We played as hard as we could,” said Buckler. “We’re not mad about our effort. It was there.” Matt wasn’t pleased about the Lady Panthers’ sluggishness early on, however. They fell behind 6-0 and committed three turnovers in the game’s first 78 seconds. Matt called a time out and most certainly didn’t want to discuss a secret strategy as he bellowed loud enough for all in the North Platte gymnasium to hear, “How about some effort at [the defensive] end?”
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