Some might look at the Emporia High girls basketball team’s schedule this week and have one phrase come to mind: It’s a doosie.
In the span of four days, the Lady Spartans will play No. 4 (Class 6A) Washburn Rural, No. 2 (Class 6A) Junction City and Manhattan, a team that was ranked earlier this season.
So how are the EHS girls preparing for the toughest stretch of basketball of their season? By using that old coaching cliché of course: They’re taking it one game at a time.
“We have to focus on what is right in front of us,” coach Bill Nienstedt said. “Obviously, we all know who we play in the other two games, but we have to make sure that our primary focus is on Washburn Rural and that we get them here at home.”
Indeed, the Lady Spartans (9-6, 3-5 Centennial League) begin this nightmarish week with a home game against Washburn Rural at 6 tonight at EHS. The two Centennial League rivals met once already this season back on Jan. 19 — a 66-43 Junior Blues victory.
Despite the 23-point loss, the EHS girls came away from the first matchup against Washburn Rural with their heads up.
“I thought we played very good when we played against them,” sophomore Alli Armitage said. “We competed hard and defended well. We just needed more of our shots to go in.”
Despite Washburn Rural’s significant advantage in depth and, at most positions, height, the Lady Spartans hung with the Junior Blues for a half, and actually only trailed by one at 21-20 midway through the second quarter.
But that’s when the Rural shooters got hot, going on a 12-3 run to close the half before sprinting away from the Lady Spartans in the final 16 minutes.
Once Emporia started to push the tempo late to try and crawl back into the game, it committed a rash of fourth-quarter turnovers that made the score worse than it appeared, Nienstedt said.
“I thought our turnover issues came in the fourth quarter when we had to play faster than we wanted to,” he said. “I thought the scoring difference was not indicative of how we played, in part because they spread it on us in the fourth quarter when we had to push the tempo and shoot it quicker.”
Since the loss to the Junior Blues, the EHS girls perhaps have proven that they gained more than they lost in the setback nearly a month ago. The Lady Spartans went on to win their home tournament, the Glacier’s Edge, and have gone 5-2 since Jan. 19.
With a rematch looming tonight to start a grueling week for the Lady Spartans — they face Junction City at home on Thursday and travel to Manhattan on Friday — Armitage said a victory over the Junior Blues (12-3, 7-2) would do wonders for the team.
“I think a win would boost our confidence a lot,” Armitage said. “It wouldn’t make us too confident or too cocky, but it would tell us that we can do this and we can beat a really good team.”
As for the Emporia High boys, they are little more a than miffed that they have a loss to Washburn Rural (9-6, 7-2) on their backs.
In the two teams’ previous matchup on Jan. 26, Rural shot 28 free throws to just 14 by the Spartans, and Emporia let a 10-point second-half lead wilt away as the Junior Blues scored a 59-55 victory over the Spartans.
“We all know that we should have beaten them the first time,” senior Dillon Cox said. “We just didn’t play well together as a team. We want to play together as a team, because that’s what we really lacked last time we played Washburn Rural.”
That loss was the first of back-to-back setbacks by Emporia — the other being a 60-53 loss at Hayden — that had the Spartans doing a little soul searching. Team chemistry, or a lack thereof, was blamed for the two consecutive poor showings, and it took some regrouping for the Spartans to get back on track.
Since then, though, the EHS boys (9-5, 4-4) have rattled off victories over Shawnee Heights, Topeka High and Seaman. In winning their last three games, the Spartans have played a better brand of team basketball, which has fueled a run of balanced scoring and stingy defense.
Two players are averaging double-figures in scoring the last three games — Caydrick Bloomquist (24.7 ppg) and Taylor Euler (15 ppg) — while another, Troy Pierce is nearly averaging a double-double (9 ppg, 8.3 rpg). Also, the Spartans have held their last three opponents to just 40 percent shooting from the field (63-of-159).
“Hopefully, we can carry on what we’ve built these last three games that we’ve won,” Cox said. “We’ve come together these last three games, and hopefully we can carry that over.”