FRANKFORT – Due to the impending weather, both North Montgomery girls and boys basketball teams concluded play of the Indiana Kitchen Classic a day early on Thursday afternoon. The Lady Chargers got things going first as they took on Winamac in the 5th place game. The Chargers offense couldn’t find much rhythm as the Warriors came away with a 44-25 win. The boys after surviving in the semi-finals in double-overtime vs North Newton squared off against Frankfort in the championship game. Like the girls before them, struggled to get any offense going and were unable to contain the Hot Dogs enough as they fell 53-34 to take second place.
A combination of turnovers leading to points and cold shooting saw the demise of the Chargers in their 5th place game against the Winamac Warriors. Winamac got out to a 15-6 lead after the opening eight minutes, but the Chargers kept hanging around for much of the first half and only trailed 23-16 heading into halftime. The second half, North Montgomery scored just nine points as the Warriors were able to cruise to the 19-point win.
“It’s tough when you give a team easy points in transition like that,” Charger coach Ryan Nuppnau said. “We knew they were going to be a little scrappy and aggressive and it’s hard to come back in a game like that especially when we’re not shooting that well. They took away our inside game and couldn’t get anything going on offense like we have in the past.”
For the game the Chargers shot just 8-32 (25%) from the field and committed 20 turnovers compared to just 7 for Winamac. The Warriors were able to crash the offensive glass all game long and come down with 13 offensive rebounds to give them countless second and even third opportunities on offense.
The Warriors themselves shot 15-42 (36%) from the field as they were led in scoring by Maggie Smith’s 17 points. Piper Link scored 10, and Emma Goodman added eight.
North failed to have any player reach double figures as Macee Norman led the Chargers with nine. Both Piper Ramey and Maely Gaskin added six with Krestyn Bradford rounding out the scoring with four.
“Winamac has a lot of good girls on the perimeter who can score,” Nuppnau said. “I was proud that we were able to take away their outside shots because they normally are a good three-point shooting team. The issue with that was we were getting beat off the drive way too much. They got some easy layups off of that. It was one of those situations where we did something well and they adjusted well while we were unable to adjust to their adjustments.”
The loss sees the Chargers end the tournament with a 1-2 record as they are now 3-13 on the season. They’ll return to action on Jan. 3 as they’ll travel to take on North Putnam for what will begin the final month of the regular season. Nuppnau knows his team has some things to work on if they want to strive to be playing their best basketball when it matters most.
“We just need to have more confidence in our shots first and foremost,” Nuppnau said. “After that we’re going to work on getting a better inside out game. When Piper and Macee take someone down low and the defense collapses, everyone needs to see that and be able to find a spot where they can have a good shot. Once we figure that out, it’ll be hard for teams to just treat us as a one-dimensional team.”
