The Western Nebraska Community College and Eastern Wyoming College women’s basketball teams will renew their Highway 26 rival Tuesday night when the 16-6 Cougars travel to Torrington, Wyo., to face the 9-11 Lancers.
Tip-off is slated for 6 p.m. at the Verl Petsch Activities Center.
Tuesday’s contest will be a match-up of teams that are similar in many ways. The Lancers are coming off a 1-1 weekend where they fell to Central Wyoming 68-67 in overtime followed by a 76-67 win against Northwest College.
Danielle Brown has been the scoring magnate for the Lancers, netting 29 points against Northwest, and then getting 26 points against Western Wyoming. In the win against Northwest, Jessica Martinez, Noelle Jones and Jessica Brown all finished with double figure scoring in the Wyoming Conference win. Jessica Brown had 16 points, followed by Jones with 12 and Martinez with 11.
WNCC sophomore Caley Fisher has a sure fire way to pick up a win for the Cougars, and that is to score more points than the other team. But, to do that, they will need to play tough defense and forgot about the recent setbacks since coming back in the new year.
The Cougar women have experienced three losses in January, including going 1-2 in the last 10 days. WNCC suffered a big loss to Northeast Nebraska 66-30. They then played one of their best defensive games in a 52-50 loss to No. 12 Northeastern Junior College on the road. It was a game they should have won, but poor first half shooting did them in.
The Cougars rebounded in a big way, though, by bettering Lamar Community College on Friday 87-55 as three Cougars – Stormye Everett, Shaquilah Davis and Amber Kistler – each finished with 18 points. Tawny Drexler also chipped in 17 points in the win.
Fisher, who also came up big offensively in the Lamar game with eight points, said they have lost a couple of games recently, but they are trying to put those games behind them and move on.
“Those losses were incredibly disappointing but we are trying to get over them and I think the last few practices we talked about it as a team and I think we have gotten a lot stronger mentally. Those games made us stronger mentally as a team. No will be thinking about the losses as hard as we have worked the last few practices. The losses won’t even me in our minds.”
The key for WNCC to pick up their 17th win of the season will be playing defense, especially in shutting or slowing down Danielle Brown. The Cougars’ have one of the best defenses in the nation giving up just 51 points a game.
“The key definitely will be defense. They shoot a lot of threes and we have to get out to them on the threes and play really tough, play as a team and work hard,” Fisher said. “We really have to focus a lot on her [Danielle] on defense and make sure someone is defending her at all times and hopefully she won’t score as many as she has been scoring in previous scores.”
The other key will be offensively and the last two contests, even though they lost to NJC, the offense has started to come around, especially the inside game.
“Offensively, we are doing better,” Fisher said. “We have new plays that coach has put in and we are going to try them out in the game [Tuesday]. I think they will work because they have been working in practice.”
Region IX Women’s Standings
Northeastern Junior College 20-1 .953
Northeast (Neb.) C.C. 19-5 .792
Otero Junior College 17-5 .773
Casper College 18-5 .782
Western Nebraska C.C. 16-6 .727
Sheridan College 16-7 .696
Miles Community College 12-6 .667
North Platte C.C. 12-8 .600
Western Wyoming C.C. 13-10 .565
Southeast (Neb.) C.C. 11-9 .550
Lamar Community College 11-11 .500
Eastern Wyoming College 9-11 .440
Central Wyoming College 8-15 .348
Little Big Horn College 9-16 .360
McCook Community College 5-15 .250
Northwest College 5-16 .238
Dawson Community College 1-16 .060
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