Article Photos

Advertisement

BUFFALO CENTER - It was a frustrating night for the Armstrong-Ringsted girls' basketball team in its 59-35 season opening loss to North Iowa.

The Bisons took an early lead and continuously extended it as the night went on while the Mustangs were seemingly out of sync offensively.

"We have some girls who are out of position offensively due to a variety of reasons," said A-R coach Steve Waldstein. "We have some good seniors but we have some younger players that are having to step up so our offense isn't clicking how we would like it. We just weren't executing."

Some credit must go to North Iowa for the lack of offensive productivity by A-R.

"I really thought we would come out and execute better than we did," said Waldstein. "But I have to give some credit to North Iowa, they're a good ball club. They did a good job on [Bri] Gonzales and [Megan] Sanders, our two big scorers. We need some other girls to step up. We had open looks, had a lot of open looks inside but we didn't put the ball down."

At halftime, the Mustangs were down by just nine points but North Iowa got rolling in the second, outscoring A-R 34-19 in the final two quarters of play.

Defensively the Mustangs did a nice job at containing the Bison's 6-2 center Amber Paden with double teams but struggled closing out to perimeter shooters.

"Paden was tough for us inside with our lack of height but we did a good job with our double teams," said Waldstein. "The bad thing about doubling a girl in the post is you have to leave one girl open outside and they made us pay by finding the open girl and nailing the big three-balls."

One positive thing A-R can take away from the loss is that they handled the aggressive full-court press defense administered by North Iowa with relative ease. "When we watched North Iowa play we saw some things that we could expose in their press and I thought we did an alright job at that," said Waldstein.

Moving forward the Mustangs will look to improve their offensive execution as the team continues to gel. "We'll get better," said Waldstein. "This is the first game, the first big test for us. I like what we have. The girls work hard and we just have to take it one game at a time. We're going to regroup, refocus and try to get our scorers scoring."

Armstrong-Ringsted will use the next two weeks to right the ship as the next game will be Dec. 4, against Clay Central-Everly in Armstrong.