The Hampton-Dumont-CAL basketball teams went 1-1 in Tuesday’s doubleheader at Humboldt, as aired on 104.9 KLMJ and RadioOnTheGo’s YouTube channel. The girls won 49-41 and the boys lost 64-52.
The Bulldog girls bounced back from a slow start and held their ground defensively. They held conference leading scorer Ava Fischer to just three points in the first half and 11 total, allowing the offense to steadily increase the advantage. MacKenzy Valley led with a career-high 35 points.
“Just keeping our confidence up, helping one another and encouraging each other to keep shooting,” Valley says. “Knocking down my free throws definitely helped that. They kept fouling, so I had to take opportunities. My teammates definitely kept encouraging me to shoot the ball, and since it was falling, it was good.”
They split the season series after falling in December.
The Bulldog boys were limited to just five points in the first quarter. They had stretches of going point-for-point, but Humboldt’s early lead was too much to overcome. Tramaine Horton and Brady Harr each scored 20 points, but hot three-point shooting by the Wildcats early in the second half grew the lead to as many as 18 points before the end.
“It’s kind of been the story of this season, we get down 16 to 20 points and then all of a sudden the switch flips, and then we get back into it,” Head Coach Matt Lokenvitz says. “And I keep trying to tell them if we don’t get down by 16 to 20 points, then you don’t have to worry about having all of that energy to come back in the end. In the fourth quarter, when you’re down 15 points, every possession becomes very, very important, whereas if you’re down two to four points, now it’s, if you make a mistake, you can live with some of those types of things, but we just gotta not get ourselves into that much of a deficit.”
The Wildcats earned the sweep in the season series.
The Bulldogs will return to action Thursday at Clarion-Goldfield-Dows on 104.9 KLMJ.
