WEST SALEM — The West Salem High School girls basketball team did not play the kind of second half coach Mike Malott expected with first place in the Coulee Conference on the line Thursday night.
The Panthers turned the ball over too much, didn’t convert on enough open shots and made just 5 of 10 attempts from the foul line after taking an 11-point halftime lead over visiting Arcadia.
But West Salem did enough to record a 59-57 victory that extended their conference win streak to 44 games and pushed them into a first-place tie with Viroqua at 4-0.
The Panthers (5-4 overall) received a big blocked shot from sophomore Anna Witte on Arcadia’s last look at the basket and a steal by junior Bella Quackenbush on the final inbounds pass to seal the victory.
“It’s the first close game we’ve really been in because in the others we’ve either been up big or down big,” said Malott, whose team beat Arcadia for the 12th straight time. “There were the Holmen and Central games, but those weren’t close like this in the last two minutes.
“The kids we have lack varsity experience in games like that. We made a lot of mental mistakes down the stretch that we shouldn’t make, but that’s because they haven’t been in that spot before.”
The Panthers took a 55-44 lead on a Josie Brudos 3-pointer with 8 minutes, 5 seconds remaining but scored just four points the rest of the way.
The Raiders (9-3, 4-1) drew to within 55-52 on a Tatum Drazkowski 3-pointer with 5:12 left before Brudos scored and Witte made two free throws for a 59-52 West Salem lead.
But a baseline jump shot by junior Amaya Schlesser had Arcadia with the final score with 23 seconds on the clock.
The Panthers missed a bonus free throw on each of their next two possessions, and the Raiders grabbed the defensive rebound on the second of those with 10 seconds to go.
The Raiders worked the ball to junior Madison Grotjahn in the left corner for an attempt at a winning shot, but Witte was there to knock it away. Quackenbush then intercepted the ball when Arcadia tried to get it into Drazkowski on an inbounds with 0.7 seconds left.
“(Witte) made a great play on that,” said Brudos, who scored 20 of her game-high 24 points in the first half. “We drilled in practice that (Grotjahn) is a great shooter, so I’m glad she read it right and got to that shot perfectly.”
Witte and sophomore Ava Hendrickson added 10 points each for West Salem, which snapped a two-game streak that includes losses to Caledonia (9-3) and Aquinas (11-1).
While it was pushed in the second half, the experience of playing the Warriors, Blugolds, Holmen (7-3) and Central (10-0) early in the season was evident in the first half.
The Panthers controlled the pace and play cleaner basketball in the first 18 minutes. In addition to the 20 points from Brudos, Hendrickson had eight points in the paint, and those helped West Salem to a 42-31 halftime lead.
Grotjahn made two of her 3-pointers in the first half and had 12 of her 17 points in the first half. Drazkowski scored 11 of her 17 in the second half.
“I thought we got up and down really well in the first half and played the kind of tempo that I wanted to play,” Malott said. We’re used to playing fast, and even though we sometimes turn the ball over a little bit, we were able to get some offensive runs.
“In the second half, they did a better job of getting back defensively, and we weren’t able to push the ball in transition the way we were able to in the first half. We also didn’t get as many good looks.”
So the Panthers will host the Blackhawks (9-2, 4-0) to determine which team moves forward as the conference leader on Tuesday. Viroqua has won eight of its past nine games with the loss coming to Sparta (6-5).
The transition from an experienced team the past couple of seasons to an inexperienced one this winter will be a continuous battle for the Panthers, but they hope some of the competition they have already played helps move that along.
“We’ve played some tough teams, especially over winter break,” said Brudos, a Winona State University softball commit who is averaging 20.1 points per game. “I think that can really set us up for success.”
