Sam Findley | For the Daily Journal
Early into Tuesday’s Johnson County tournament matchup at Edinburgh, it looked like Whiteland and second-year head coach Kellie Kirkhoff had figured it out.
Full-court press the Lancers and convert on offensive rebounds, and you should be good for a win.
Whiteland not only won but won big, routing the Lancers 70-31. Freshmen Sophia Dyer and Carly Vindielingen were at the epicenter of the win for the Warriors (2-3), scoring 15 and 10, respectively. Junior Gwen Higdon led all scorers with 17 points.
“Tonight was those two freshmen’s first varsity starts,” Kirkhoff said. “We’re really excited about the improvement, the progress and the hard work that they’ve put into the game of basketball. We do have a good core around them tonight. We started two freshmen, two sophomores and a senior, so that’s a big deal. Not only for right now, but for our future.”
One of the only two seniors on the Edinburgh roster, Gracie Crawhorn was the lone Lancer to get anything going. She finished with 16 points, more than half of her team’s total.
The young Lancers team made up of six freshmen struggled greatly to progress across midcourt, and when they did a strong Whiteland defense awaited them.
Crawhorn’s two early 3s got Edinburgh on the board in the first quarter and her second even gave Edinburgh a 6-3 lead with 5:11 left. But with Whiteland’s high pressure defense and forward Vondielingen picking up numerous offensive rebounds at the other end, the Warriors took over.
Edinburgh head coach Amy Schilling believes her young team did well handling the full-court press but let Warrior bigs slip in for easy points.
“I don’t think we did terrible breaking (the press),” she said. “We haven’t seen a lot of presses that way, and we have three freshmen that we’re starting. I think the freshmen are going to have to learn; we can’t simulate that in practice. So I knew we were going to struggle a little bit, but I really didn’t think that the press is what hurt us as bad as second chance shots off rebounds.”
Edinburgh (2-3) struck first in the second quarter, with an out of bounds play that found Kenna Streeval for a basket that cut the Whiteland lead to 16-9. But Dyer and Higdon went to work for Whiteland, combining for 13 points in the period.
Claire Coryell provided a bench spark for the Warriors, ending the third quarter with back-to-back two-point possessions. She sank two free throws and pickpocketed an Edinburgh player for a fast-break layup to put Edinburgh in a 38-point hole.
Whiteland plays Center Grove in a semifinal game Thursday, and Kirkhoff will look to continue to put up a strong defensive show.
“We’ve been scouting Center Grove, and I think that we have a pretty good idea of their tendencies, but there’s no reason for us to change how we play now,” she said. “We’ll make adjustments as we go. But it’s really just defensive mindset, defensive oriented, that we’re really committed to sitting down in a stance and playing a defense and then we can kind of go from there.”
The Lancers will look to learn from the loss and take it to conference and sectional play.
“We’ve just got to learn to get more physical to play with it in just below on our blocking out,” Schilling said. “We were in position but we just weren’t clearing them out. So I’m pretty happy. I don’t care about the score. I just want us to learn and get better every game.”
