‘A total team effort’ brings another win for women’s basketball

Rolling on a lead established early on for the team, the Ladycards were able to put the game away for a 83-44 win against the University of Utah-Eastern on Saturday.
Sophomore Stormee Van Belle put up 15 points, nine rebounds and a steal for the team, with fellow sophomore Shelby Cloninger following suit managing to put up 13 points, five rebounds and two steals.
The team effort was evident during the game as every player was able to put in time on the court and just about every player on the team racked some points for the board as well.
“It’s a total team effort all the time,” coach Chris Carlson said. “That’s the only thing that’s really going to get us anywhere.”
Both the offensive and defensive play were on point for the team as they led by 27 points by halftime, and finished with almost double USU-Eastern’s score of 44 by the end of the game.
“I thought our defensive effort was outstanding,” coach Carlson said. “I thought we did a lot of good things mixing it up, our ball pressure was good, we rotated well, we’re just rock-solid on defense.”
The team’s 48 total rebounds are a testament to the kind of defensive pressure that they were able to execute upon.
“We are really big on defense and rebounds,” freshman Alyssa Case (F) said. “At the beginning of the season, we were a good rebounding team, but I feel like we’re making progress to become a great rebounding team.”
The ladies had one quarter throughout the game where they failed to put up more than 20 points while USU-Eastern was only able to grab 17 points in the first half.
“We’re really focusing right now on running through all our plays and making a lot of transition plays,” freshman Sidney Davis (F) said. “Instead of just trying to get the one open shot right away, we’re trying to get the smart shot.”
Though the team was able to grab the early lead in the first half, the Cardinals were intent on keeping the steady lead throughout the game.

Freshman Charity Marlatt tosses the ball to fellow freshman Ebony Norman. Norman put up 12 points for the ladies against USU-Eastern last Saturday (Katie Hartwig, Sentintel).

“We’ve been working on coming out better,” coach Carlson said. “We’ve had to learn a couple of tough lessons in the past. We’ve had a few games where we had a let down after halftime so we’ve been very intentional on how we come out.”
USU-Eastern began to improve their statistical blunder throughout the second, but NIC was able to maintain their intensity as well to ultimately give them the win.
“We really wanted to focus on coming out as strong as we could because we knew they were going to come out strong also,” Davis said.
The Cardinals will be traveling to Utah this Thursday to face Salt Lake Community College whom the team lost to only a few weeks ago at home. The game may prove to be one of the crucial points for the Cardinals in securing a top spot in the conference as the season draws closer to it’s mid-February conclusion. Salt Lake currently stands tied with College of Southern Idaho at the top spot in the Scenic West Athletic Conference.
“Salt Lake is good,” coach Carlson said. “They’ve been ranked number one for a long time. We’re going to have to play an awfully good game of basketball. We can’t make many mistakes, we cant give up easy baskets. We need to play our best basketball game of the year.
The game may prove to be one of the crucial points for the Cardinals in securing a top spot in the conference as the season draws closer to it’s mid-February conclusion.
The game will be broadcast live on Thursday via Cardinal Live Stream starting at 4:30 p.m.