Ryan Murken

Your Prep Sports

CORALVILLE – Like any coach Nate Frese would like to avoid double digit first-quarter deficits.

The benefit Frese has after seeing his team fall into an early 10-point hold on Sunday is the second-year West High coach knows his team can escape from such a situation.

West High overcame a slow start offensively and an early 12-2 deficit to down cross-town rival Liberty High 50-42 on Sunday in a meeting of Mississippi Valley Conference rivals at Xtream Arena in Coralville.

“That is what is so good about our team is that we can be down 12-0 and we know how to bounce back from that,” West High sophomore Grace Fincham said. “Everyone has something that helped us come back into that game. We were down and we didn’t hang our heads, we all kept going and that’s what got us back in the game.”

Freshman Sasha Baldwin had a game-high 18 points and Fincham added 15 points and nine rebounds as West High (2-3) won its second straight game after three consecutive losses to ranked opponents to open the season.

The win avenged a 72-60 loss to Liberty High in the most recent meeting between the two cross-town rivals last February.

“With such a young team we are going to have some peaks and valleys and coming out of the three games we had at the beginning of the year we are trying to keep them believing that we are making progress which is hard sometimes when you are losing by double digits but now we are kind of seeing the fruits of that,” Frese said. “They play together, they’ve stayed together.”

Liberty High (1-4) scored the first nine points of the game, led 12-2 less than six minutes into the game and 18-13 with five minutes left in the first half.

West High nearly matched its scoring output from the opening 11 minutes of the game during an 11-0 run to end the first half that spanned 4:36 and gave the Trojans a 24-18 cushion.

“We kept preaching that it’s a marathon not a sprint,” Frese said. “We’ve seen Liberty get up 15-0 on Cedar Rapids Washington and lose that game and we saw them get down 14-0 on Clear Creek Amana come back. We told them it’s ups and downs.”

The 11-0 West High burst to end the half closed with back-to-back 3-pointers by Fincham and Baldwin in a span of 67 seconds.

Fincham had seven points in the 11-0 run.

“We just had to keep having trust in ourselves,” Baldwin said. “We’ve had ups and down this season and we just need to know that we can come back from a deficit. We just had to keep our heads up and keep lifting each other up.”

West High missed its first nine shots, needed more than five minutes to score its first point and was 1-of-13 from the floor in the opening quarter.

Still the Trojans trailed just 12-6 after the opening eight minutes.

The run late in the second quarter gave West High a lead it would never give up.

West High shot 48 percent in the second half as senior guard Lucy Wolf scored all 10 of her points after halftime.

“She asked me coming out of halftime, what she could do to help us win which I thought showed a lot of growth and a lot of maturity from her,” Frese said of Wolf. “I loved that she did that and she stayed the course. She stayed attacking the basket and she stayed solid on defense.”

Liberty High got as close as one when it scored six points in 22 seconds on a Natalie Ramsey conventional 3-point play and a Kennedy Goodheart 3-pointer that cut the lead to 38-37 with 6:56 to play.

Baldwin answered with a 3-pointer and after a Sydney Van Heukelom basket the Trojans scored the next six points and closed the game on a 9-3 run.

“We’ve learned that we can’t take our foot off the gas,” Baldwin said. “We just need to give it our all whenever we are on the floor and we need to be able to keep going even when we are tired.”

Goodheart had 12 points and Ramsey had 10 points and seven rebounds for Liberty High.

Liberty High                          12  6   13  11  –  42

West High                               6  18  12  14  –  50

Liberty High (42) – Ava Casey 2-4 0-0 5, Bella Tafolla 1-7 0-0 2, Ava Tague 1-4 0-0 2, Natalie Ramsey 3-11 4-4 10, Madeline Casey 2-8 2-2 7, Kennedy Goodheart 5-11 0-0 12, Sydney Van Heukelom 2-2 0-0 4, Totals 16-57 6-6 42.

West High (50) – Lucy Wolf 5-11 0-1 10, Ava Frese 3-6 1-2 7, Kate Van Waning 0-1 0-0 0, Elle Barnett 0-4 0-0 0, Abby Neumiller 0-1 0-0 0, Grace Fincham 5-14 4-4 15, Sasha Baldwin 5-9 5-6 18, Totals 18-46 10-13 50.

3-point field goals – ICL 4-16 (A. Casey 1-3, Tafolla 0-2, Tague 0-1, M. Casey 1-5, Goodheart 2-5), ICW 4-20 (Wolf 0-4, Neumiller 0-1, Barnett 0-3, Fincham 1-6, Baldwin 3-6). Rebounds – ICL 24 (Ramsey 7), ICW 39 (Fincham 9). Turnovers – ICL 13, ICW 13. Total fouls – ICL 16, ICW 7. Fouled out – None. Technical fouls – None.

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