Ladies come up short

Sonja Karp
NLJ Sports Reporter
 
The Lady Dogies returned from Christmas break with another challenging week of competition. On Jan. 4 they traveled to Worland to face off against the No. 3 ranked Lady Warriors and then hosted the No. 6 ranked Lady Trailblazers of Torrington on Friday. 
Uncharacteristic shooting woes and third quarter doldrums, in combination with struggles taking care of the basketball, were all contributing factors, but despite adding two losses to the season record, head coach Chad Ostenson feels good about where his team is at this point in the season.
“I look back at our stuff last year and at this time we were right at the bottom,” he began. “We started focusing on our shooting and our game and things came around so I feel confident that we will get there this year as well.”
The Lady Warriors are a big, physical team who start four seniors who are strong and physically mature. Though the Lady Dogies matched up pretty well as far as height went, they were outmanned and Worland used their big inside presence very well, which hurt Newcastle.
The Lady Dogies actually tied the Lady Warriors points in the first, second and fourth quarters combined, but getting outscored by 15 points in the third ended up being the difference in the contest as Newcastle found themselves down 41-56 at the final buzzer. 
“I thought we did some good things and we were right in there until the third quarter got us again. Those have been pretty rough for us this year,” Ostenson sighed. “We’ve got to figure out that when the threes aren’t falling we have to go inside and we also need to get more balanced scoring. We have the shooters to do it, but we’re just not doing that right now.”
Jaylen Ostenson led the team with 21 points and nine rebounds on the night, and she was followed by Mercedes Voelker with nine, all of which came from beyond the arc. Tiernan Stanton put in four points and pulled down 11 rebounds, while Shelby Tidyman added three points and Claire Beastrom and Shawnee Miles each chipped in two.
“This early season schedule we have been playing has been tough but it will benefit us in the end. Right now we just have to keep everyone going in the right direction,” Ostenson explained. “It’s a tough trip to Worland on a Monday and then we came back to a pretty physical Torrington team on Friday.”
Defensively, the Lady Dogies executed well against the Lady ‘Blazers, only allowing them to score 35 points and holding their leading scorer to only 12 points, however they struggled to put points on the board.
Newcastle led by two at the end of the first quarter, but only managed to score three points in the second so were in a four point deficit going into the locker room. 
It was a physical game throughout, and it came down to a nail biter at the end. After getting down 10 points, the Lady Dogies battled back to within one down the stretch and it easily could have gone the other way, however the ‘Blazers were able to get back to the four point lead they enjoyed at half time to take the 35-31 win.
“I was really happy with our defense. We ran a man-to-man and sagged off some of the guards to help inside while Tiernan and Jay did a great job in the paint,” Ostenson nodded. “We also ran some zone to help with the post and our wings were closing hard on the guards to keep them from getting hot.”
“I was a little nervous going in but the kids did everything they were supposed to do besides make a layup,” he chuckled. “There were several who struggled, so we just need to slow down and finish. I think we were going in just a little too fast.”
Once again, Ostenson led her team with 21 points and was followed by Voelker with six. However, from there only Stanton and Hunter McFarland got on the board with two points each, and Coach Ostenson emphasized the need to get back to more balanced scoring from other members of the team.
The Lady Dogies also got out-rebounded by eight against Worland and 16 against Torrington. In addition, they lost the turnover battle against Worland 21-16, and though they won that category against Torrington 22-25, it was still too many according to Ostenson who reiterated that the goal is to keep that number under 15 in every game.
“We had several unforced turnovers with bad passes, and those are the mental ones we need to cut out,” he admitted. “I’ll take a travel here and there, but the unforced ones are hard to take. Worland scored 17 points off of turnovers and you take four or five of those away and it’s a different ball game.”
On Saturday, Newcastle is on the road again with a long trip to Rawlins to take on the Lady Outlaws. They are a solid team who didn’t lose much from last year’s squad and are currently 4-1 on the season. Ostenson believes his team matches up pretty well with them though so predicts that it should be a good game.