Kennedy Girls Basketball Dominates Long Beach

The senior leadership of the Kennedy Lady Cougars was too much for the young Long Beach squad to overcome on Friday afternoon.

The Cougars, whose starting lineup consists of four seniors and one junior, began the game with an 8-0 run in the first two minutes and never looked back to earn their first Conference AA-III victory of the season, defeating the Marines 58-24. Long Beach fell to 2-2 in conference play.

“It makes us feel good to win our first conference game,” Kennedy head coach Debbie Cipolla said. “We were able to execute the things we have been working on and it was the first time all season we played together as a team.”

Kennedy's senior guard duo of Allie Keller and Morgan Kitton helped lead the way for the Lady Cougars on the scoreboard and on the backboard. Keller finished with 20 points, six rebounds and two assists, including three shots from three point range, while Kitton added 12 points and 14 rebounds.

“Allie is a great court leader,” Cipolla said. “She helped on defense by bringing us together and did a terrific job helping us get the victory today.”

On the other side of the court, Long Beach head coach Lori DeVivio said she hopes her team will use this game as a learning tool for the future.

“We’re a very young team with a starting lineup that consists of one freshman, two sophomores, one junior, and one senior,” she said. “When our players become seniors, we expect to be playing at the level that we saw from Kennedy today. We were clearly overmatched because of the experience factor.”

Despite only scoring 24 points in the game, DeVivio said she liked what she saw offensively from her team even though they only scored six points in the first quarter, five in the second and three in the third.

“We ran our offensive sets much better today even though we were not scoring because we have been struggling all season,” DeVivio said. “We felt better about the sets that we ran even though we could not convert them into buckets. We are starting to get better chemistry on the court in running the offense.”

The Marines were led in scoring by freshmen forward Liz Rourke and sophomore forward Molly Martin who both recorded five points. This was only the second game where Martin was held to single digit scoring.

“We defended Martin, who is a really good player, really well tonight,” Cipolla said. “The team did a great job defensively today holding them to 24 points.”

The Cougars host a winless Carey squad on Tuesday night with tip-off scheduled for 7 p.m.