North Girls Cruise to Win in Metea's Varsity Debut

AURORA – There weren't many games that last year's seven-win Naperville North girls basketball team wound up with a comfortable victory.

But in Tuesday's season opener against Metea Valley, the Huskies took control near the end of the first quarter and never looked back in a 53-32 win. It was the first varsity game for Metea's program.

"We were never up like this at any time last year," North coach Jacquie Discipio said. "We were a team that was always crawling back last year. I think that's going to be different for us this year. We're off to a good start."

With the Huskies drawing nothing but iron early on, Metea jumped out to a 5-2 lead in the opening minutes. But once North was able to get its break going by forcing turnovers, the tide slowly started to turn.

"Unfortunately, the game is 32 minutes, not five," Metea coach Kris Kalivas said. "The disappointing part is that I don't feel like we executed any part of the game that we worked on the past two weeks. It's not so much the loss that I'm concerned about. It's our lack of execution pretty much in every aspect and our lack of paying attention to detail."

Junior Shannon Bushman and sophomore Zoe Swift started to turn the tide for North. Their pressure defense helped force Metea into 29 turnovers, including seven each in the first and second quarters as North built its lead.

"I think as a team we were nervous because it was our first game and some of us haven't played together on varsity yet," Bushman said. "We were getting our momentum. I think after a couple of minutes it just got to the point where we were working as a team and picking it up."

North closed the half on an 11-4 run to take a 30-19 lead into the break. The Huskies led by as many as 26 points, 50-24, early in the fourth quarter. Bushman scored 13 of her game-high 18 points in the first half.

"Shannon was great," Discipio said. "She looked great tonight. Shannon and Zoe stole the show. It was awesome, very exciting."

Swift scored nine points, but more importantly dished out six assists and had five of North's 18 steals. Jenna Jatczak and Emily Koch each scored 10 points.

The Mustangs had their problems adjusting to the speed of the varsity game most of the night. Anna Petersen led the way with 11 points and seven rebounds.

"As much as you preach to them that the varsity level is a different pace, I think that they needed to be thrown into it to believe it," Kalivas said. "We left the locker room saying that if we can learn from this game, then it was worthwhile. We're going to take baby steps here."