MORGANTOWN — No. 5 (AA) Winfield was too quick for the Morgantown girls’ basketball team to keep pace Friday night.
The two teams met in the final game on the first day of the Buffalo Wild Wings Holiday Classic, and despite having home-court advantage, the Mohigans (3-5) couldn’t withstand the pres defense of the Generals as they fell 58-46.
“We turned it over too much against that pressure. We worked a lot against it, we knew defensively what they liked to do, and the last two days of practice we spent a lot of time on that. Its disappointing we didn’t execute a little bit better,” coach Jason White said.
Morgantown struggled to pass the ball efficiently, often moving out of control and tossing the ball straight to the defense.
“We have to learn to make better passes than we did tonight. I give them credit, they sped us up to a speed we can’t play at,” White said. “We have to settle down and trust the process a little bit. We have to be in the right spots and fake passes to make passes.”
The aggressive Winfield defense wore down the Mohigans mentally and physically, resulting in adverse effects on their defensive play as well.
“I thought our trouble started on the defensive end of the floor. We didn’t defend very well at all and we switched and played several different defenses in the first half looking for something to kind of be the spark and we just couldn’t find it. We can’t stand in line defensively,” White said.
Morgantown has been no stranger to these errors this season, as they’ve struggled to find their chemistry on the floor. According to White, the team has devoted plenty of practice time to the problems still present, but he has yet to see the team make game-time adjustments.
“We’ve talked about all those things in practice, and practice is much more controlled, but we can stop and point out those things and correct it,” he said.
“But we continue to make those same mistakes over and over and over, and if we don’t learn from those we’re going to have the same results.”
Sophomore Kaitlyn Ammons, who led the team with 19 points, said the solution to the issue is more effort from the team as a whole.
“We have to be more intense on both ends of the floor. We need to rebound more, pass better — it’s just the simple things for us, nothing big. We know our offenses and where we need to be, we just have to do it,” she said.
Morgantown returns home for the second day of the showcase today, tipping off at 5 p.m. against Chapmanville. The Mohigans will face a similar style of defensive play, and White said the key to victory depends on how his team adjusts after seeing it last night.
“Chapmanville is going to play us in a 1-2-2 as well, and they’ll extend it up into the full court, whereas Winfield, when they came full-court they played more man. It’ll be a good test, and we’re going to have to grow up from tonight,” he said. “We’ll have to learn from the mistakes we made tonight, because we’re going to see the same thing tomorrow.”
