After taking a 21-5 lead after just one quarter of play, the Lafayette High School girls basketball cruised to a 53-32 win at Oakville in Suburban West Conference play Friday evening.
The win for the Lancers (14-4, 4-0 Suburban West) extended Lafayette’s winning streak to six games and kept them atop the conference standings.
“We knew coming in that Lafayette is a very good basketball team that’s well coached, has a lot of seniors and we knew that they were going to throw all kinds of things at us,” Oakville head coach Aaron Bosch said. “We’ve got a real young team with two freshmen starting that are also my two leading scorers, so we’ve been setting small goals for this group. We’ve hit some rough stretches in scheduling and the girls are playing hard and they’re starting to reach some of those goals.”
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Oakville junior Alex Perry led the Tigers in scoring with eight points. She’s currently averaging 4.4 points per game this season.
“We had some good passes and back cuts,” Perry said. “Our team is starting to mesh really well and a few of us are going to go over to the Arnold Recreation Center to play with the guys in order to get better. We’re starting to talk now out on the court and we didn’t really do that at the start of the season and that’s mostly because we’re so young.”
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The Lancers hadn’t played in over a week, which lead to some concern for head coach Jennifer Porter.
“It’s a conference game and we knew that we would have to come out and play well because we hadn’t played in a week,” Porter said. “We went from playing three games a week for three weeks in a row down to playing just one game a week, so we knew that we would have to put together a good effort both offensively and defensively.”
Lafayette’s Hannah Schneider led all scorers with 19 points. Schneider is currently averaging 7.1 points per game this season.
“Hannah’s been playing great,” Porter said. “She went from a situation where she started out the year starting and then Claire Norfleet started played good and then she took the starting spot. Now Hannah is back to playing great again and we feel like we’ve got more than five starters on this team and she really stepped up and made some big baskets for us.”
The setback for Oakville (4-11, 0-3 Suburban West) marked the Tigers fifth straight loss this season.
Oakville hits the hardwood again on Monday at 7 p.m. as the Tigers take on St. Charles in the first round of the Lindbergh Invitational.
