Lady Bulldogs fall to Columbia Falls
Despite poor scoring in the first half, it looked like the Lady Dogs might get the best of the rival Wildkats Thursday night.
Columbia Falls came roaring back, however, scoring 45 points in the second half for a 57-25 Northwest A conference win.
“I think we stopped being aggressive,” head coach Ben Johnson said. “Our mindset was to hold their three leading scorers down, but we let some of the other girls score.”
The Lady Dogs managed single-digit scoring totals for each quarter, notching three, five, eight and nine points in each quarter of play.
Columbia Falls scored 31 points in the fourth quarter alone.
The score doesn’t tell the whole story, Johnson said.
“Everybody wants to look at the scoreboard and think we got destroyed. You’ve got to roll back and look at last year’s score, it was 80-11,” Johnson said.
Payton Kastella led Whitefish with 12.
Johnson said Kastella’s performance was the result of a lot of hard work before and during this season.
“She has a mindset to do the best she can for her team. She’s playing aggressive, and she’s a young sophomore so she’s developing that offense,” he said.
Saturday’s matchup against Browning was canceled due to poor road conditions. A make-up game has been scheduled for Feb. 1.
This week the Lady Dogs host Libby Friday before taking on Polson at home Saturday.
Frey and Freya for the 59th annual Whitefish Winter Carnival will also be crowned prior to the start of the boys game, just after the girls game, at 6:30 p.m.
Johnson said right now the focus for the team is just getting back to a defensive mindset.
“We’re just trying to get back to the tough defense we’ve been playing all year and see if we can figure it out on the offensive end,” he said. “We’re taking a lot of good shots, we’re just not making them. We can beat Libby if we play like we should.”
Whitefish 3 5 8 9 — 25
Columbia Falls 9 3 14 31 — 57
WHITEFISH — Kit Anderson 2, Clarie Carloss 2, Kaiah Moore 3, Ashton Ramsey 1, Annisa Brown 5, Payton Katella 12.
COLUMBIA FALLS — Dani Douglas 3, Savannah Ellis 6, Lakia Hill 8, Hannah Gedlaman 10, Josie Windauer 2, Hannah Schweikert 2, Ryley Kehr 9, Diana Vasquez 1, Trista Cowan 16.