Hampton-Dumont-CAL will travel to Humboldt for a North Central Conference basketball doubleheader Tuesday, which’ll air on 104.9 KLMJ and RadioOnTheGo’s YouTube channel.
Coming off consecutive losses to West Fork and #2 (3A) Clear Lake, a win by the Bulldog boys would keep them in contention for as high as third place in the North Central Conference standings. Head Coach Matt Lokenvitz says they need to learn how to maintain leads late in games, which has been a challenge at times.
“The biggest thing is just the mental focus,” Lokenvitz says. “When you get to about that three to four minute mark in the fourth quarter, if you’ve got an anywhere from eight to 15-point lead, you can’t just let off the gas and then be like, okay, we’re almost done with the game. We’ve got the lead. We’ve got to keep the pedal down as they say. And we’ve got to be able to start putting teams away and stretch it to 20 and see if they can respond and get back. And a lot of times if you’re up eight to 10 points and all of a sudden you get a steal and go get a layup and then you you get another defensive stop and go get another layup, now it’s 14 or it’s 16. Now they start to crumble and kind of go the other way. But it’s just kind of that mental side where we’ve still got to learn how to win. And now we’ve kind of gotten to that point where we can win these close games. We just got to get to that point where we can now put a team away when you have the for sure lead.”
The Bulldogs lost 49-38 in the previous meeting with the Wildcats, which featured numerous lead changes.
The Bulldog girls will look to flip the result of the last meeting, won 35-27 by Humboldt. MacKenzy Valley has had four straight double figure scoring nights, including 19 points in Saturday’s loss at West Fork. Humboldt fell 44-39 to Webster City in its last game. Ava Fischer scores 20.1 points per game to lead the conference.
Pregame coverage will start at 5:45 p.m., followed by the tipoff at 6:00.
