LINDEN — North Montgomery girls basketball hosted Bethesda Christian on Tuesday and for through three quarters, it was anyone’s ball game. The Chargers were keeping pace with the Patriots and only trailed by six entering the final quarter. However a 13-3 final period doomed any chance of a Charger win and visiting Patriots came away with a 38-22 victory.
Offense was a struggle for both teams throughout the game as it was the season opener for Bethesda and the second gmae for the young Chargers. North Montgomery didn’t get its first field goal of the game until the 6:01 mark of the second quarter while the Patriots were able to go to the free-throw line to build an early lead. It was 15-10 entering halftime and 25-19 entering the final eight minutes, but a crucial Piper Ramey fifth foul in the early stages of the fourth allowed the Patriots to pull away. Ramey led all scorers with 13 points in the win and grabbed 11 rebounds.
Despite the loss the Chargers played well defensively and that allowed them to stay in the game. It was something that Charger coach Ryan Nuppnau highlighted afterwards.
“I’m proud of the way our girls played on that side of the ball,” Nuppnau said. “Bethesda comes in with a senior point guard in (Kenzie) Fulks who’s extremely good and we hold her to 12. We put Caelyn Carpenter who is a freshman out there on her and she did an awesome job. Our supporting cast did a great job of helping on her. Our defsense gave us a shot to win the game, unfortunately offensively we didn’t make enough shots and that’s something we’ll work on.”
Carpenter was also the second-leading scorer for the Chargers with four points in the loss. Macee Norman added three while Krestyn Bradford scored two.
Fulks led the Patriots with 12 while Sydney Goodin scored 11. Jayla Ferguson added six, Leah Heim five, and Tori Hamilton rounded out the scorinf for Bethesda with four.
North Montgomery (0-2) shot just 8-41 (19.5%) from the field in the loss including 0-11 from three. They were 6-13 (46%) from the foul line and did do a good job of rebouding with 34 rebounds. They turned the ball over 23 times.
Bethesda (1-0) shot 11-37 (29.7%) from the floor and just 2-10 from three. They made 14-20 (70%) shots from the foul line while grabbing 36 rebounds and turning the ball over 20 times.
After giving up 61 points in their season opener to Parke Heritage on Saturday, Nuppnau was pleased to see the improvement his team made from that game. North is playing a lot of young freshman and sophomores along with Ramey on the floor. He knows it will take some time but liked the progress his team made even from their first game.
“Parke Heritage is a team that is going to make their mark this season so starting this season with two tough teams with really good point guards is challenging,” he said. “We have no seniors and are playing some young girls so stepping on the varsity court against good competition is an eye opener for some of these girls. It’s nice for these teams to expose our weaknesses early so we can work on them.”
Norht will have two more games on the docket this week. The first will come on Thursday when they travel to take on Frontier. They’ll conclude the week on Friday with a trip to Attica.
