South Putnam fall to Rockville in Indy

Thursday, December 23, 2010
South Putnam's Kelsey Whitaker looks to dribble past her Rockville defender during Wednesday's game at Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Shooting struggles and a dominating first half performance from Rockville's Beth Mahurin spoiled South Putnam's trip to Conseco Fieldhouse Wednesday. The Rox evened its record at 5-5 after their 57-29 win, while South Putnam fell to 1-9 on the season.

The Eagles came out strong and aggressive and played the bigger Rox tight in the early portion of the first quarter. However, when Rockville starting hitting shots, the Eagles were left playing catch up. A late three from Lindsey Greene put Rockville ahead 15-6 after one quarter and extended its advantage to 27-10 at the break.

Rockville blended nice inside/outside play, which caused South Putnam troubles all evening. Head coach Debbie Steffy said that double threat is perhaps the most difficult to fight.

"That was the thing with them," she said. "When you get down 17 at halftime, you can come out in the second half and maybe try to take something away from them, but they're a team that you can't take just one thing away. If you take away their post play, then they have three-point shooting. If you try to concentrate on taking the three, then they got their post player. That's tough for a team to be able to concentrate two areas that you have to take away in order to get back into the ball game.

"They're a good team. They're an experienced team. They have some good varsity experience out there. We'll get there. We just have some kids playing that don't have that much experience, but we'll get there," Steffy said.

Jenna Jones led the Eagles in the first half with four points, followed by Ericka Minor, Alex McHugh and Mallory Cash with two points each.

The Eagles didn't fare much better in the second half as Rockville continued to score, while the Eagles struggled to find the twine. South Putnam was outscored 30-19 in the second half, but was able to take Mahurin out of the equation, limiting her to just four points after a 12-point first half.

Jones added eight points to her total in the second half to end the night with a team-high 12 points. The Eagles enter the second half of their season on seven game skid, but Steffy hopes the team takes what it has been doing well and expands on it.

"I would hope they would take this in stride and say 'OK, we played a really good team, but we did get to play at Conseco. It was a cool deal.' We have spurts where we did some good things. We had spurts where we didn't do good things and we get to now go into the second half of our season where we get to play a lot of sectional opponents. So it's one of those things where we've had our growing pains, so hopefully everything is going to pay off in the second half of the season," Steffy said.

South Putnam will host North Vermillion on Dec. 30 at 9:30 a.m. in the opening game of the South Putnam Tournament.

At Conseco Fieldhouse

South Putnam 6 4 10 9 -- 29

Rockville 15 12 14 16 -- 57

South Putnam -- Jones 12, Masters 4, McHugh 3, Minor 2, Whitaker 2, Cash 2, Searles 2, Birt 1, Clark 1. Totals: 8-29 FG, 13-25 FT, 29 TP.

Rockville -- Mahurin 16, Greene 13, Lee 8, Donovan 6, Woodard 5, Sutherlin 4, Gordon 3, D. Kelly 2. Totals: 21-52 FG, 11-17 FT, 57 TP.

Next game -- South Putnam will host North Vermillion on Dec. 30 at 9:30 a.m. in the opening game of the South Putnam Tournament.