ROCKFORD — Cassie Glendenning couldn’t do it by herself. But once Val McKnight and Stillman Valley’s press kicked into gear, Lutheran’s undefeated days were over.
Glendenning scored a career-high 30 points and McKnight added 17, all in the final 20 minutes, to help the Cardinals rally from 10 points down in the second half and knock off the Crusaders 63-52 Friday.
The loss by Lutheran (8-1, 0-1 Big Northern West) leaves Dakota and Oregon as the area’s only unbeaten girls basketball teams.
“It hurts a lot. It hurts a ton,” Lutheran’s Callie Rezin, who scored 13 points, said of the Crusaders falling from the unbeaten ranks. “It just eats away at you.”
Lutheran jumped to a 13-4 lead before Glendenning made her first basket. She scored the next eight Cardinal points to start a rally that brought Stillman to within 21-20.
“She held our team together,” McKnight said. “She’s 5-foot-6 but she acts like she’s 6-2.”
McKnight and Shelby Bruder (eight points) were big parts of that surge, too.
“We play very well as a team, but sometimes it takes awhile to get into our flow,” Glendenning said.
Rezin and fellow sophomore guard Laura Rushing (17 points) helped Lutheran build its lead back up to 35-25 midway through the third quarter.
But Stillman (6-3, 1-1) then finally stopped Lutheran’s fastbreak.
“We know better than to let deep passes be thrown,” Glendenning said. “We ended that after it happened a few times.”
The Cardinals also then dialed up their press. They forced 12 of Lutheran’s 19 turnovers in the game’s final 12 minutes.
“Sometimes it takes a little longer, but we’ll get there,” McKnight said. “It also hurt them that Heather Baier got hurt.”
Lutheran’s senior point guard left at halftime after aggravating a nagging back injury.
“I’m not going to make excuses, but without our point guard, we shut down on the press,” Lutheran coach Joni Carlson said. “Their press just destroyed us.”
Not as much as Glendenning, who scored 15 points in the fourth quarter, mostly on relentless drives to the basket.
“Stillman really turned it up in the fourth quarter,” Carlson said.
- Matt Trowbridge, rrstar.com
