Cougars Girls' Basketball Overcomes Slow Start, Downs Eagles

The first quarter could not have gone much worse for the Cherry Hill East girls’ basketball team Thursday afternoon.

The Cougars turned the ball over with regularity, missed open shots and struggled to defend. The result was a 14-2 deficit to a West Deptford squad without a single starter back from last season.

“I think the intensity wasn’t happening for us in the first quarter,” Cherry Hill East coach Kim Keyack said. “We can’t come out thinking people are going to lay down for us. You have to fight from the tip.”

This time around the Cougars were able to learn that lesson and still come out victorious, after an 18-0 run bridging the second and third quarters carried the team to a 37-30 win in the opening round of the West Deptford Holiday Hoops Tournament.

East will be back in action today when it takes on Gloucester Catholic in the finals at 3 p.m.

Freshman Yamalis Villegas led the Cougars with 13 points and provided quality defense as East turned a 16-3 deficit into a 21-16 advantage early in the third quarter.

“All we really had to do was focus, gather ourselves and start concentrating on the defensive end,” said Villegas. “As a team, we had to get all the energy we had as a group and leave it on the court.”

The Cougars were able to stifle the Eagles after the first quarter, thanks to defensive pressure which forced West Deptford into nine turnovers in the second quarter.

“One player feeds off another player, so when one player has a lot of energy, then the next player is going to have that same energy, and it just spread around the whole team,” Villegas said.

“Putting pressure on the ball is important,” added Keyack. “We have fast guards and we have to take advantage of that. We can’t sit back and let the game come to us; we have to make something happen. When you play good defense it gets the energy flowing on the team, and that turns into automatic points.”

When the first-quarter struggles subsided, East began getting contributions up and down its roster. Zoe Schlessel scored six of her 10 points in the second quarter, while Julia Presant chipped in with seven points. Once East began to get on a roll, West Deptford seemed helpless to stop it.

“In the first quarter, our posts were working together—we were running out, pushing the ball up the floor, and then I think we just hit a block at some point,” said first-year West Deptford coach Casey Heitman. “I think some of our inexperience came back to get us. Some of the girls in the past would have known to brush it off and move on, but I think it just snowballed for us and we couldn’t dig ourselves out of it.”

The Cougars have a tall task in front of them today as they face a Gloucester Catholic team that entered the tournament as heavy favorites. Keyack says she hopes the team enters the game with confidence and ready to give full effort for 32 minutes.

“I’m looking for the same thing I got (Thursday),” Keyack said. “You go out and you play. Basketball is a game and you play it because it’s fun. We are going to go out and do the best that we can, and I only ask them every single day to be better than you were yesterday.”