Crawfordsville girls basketball senior Elyse Widmer is currently playing some of the best basketball of her career. After draining four threes last Saturday vs Attica, the senior had another stellar shooting night making four more threes and finishing with a career high 17 points to help lead her Lady Athenians to a 52-45 win over North Montgomery.
With just over a minute remaining the score read 46-43 Athenians, but Cville was able to hold on late scoring five out of the last seven for the victory. The win marks the third straight win over the Chargers for Crawfordsville and Cville coach Tyler Smith was all smiles as he talked about his senior playing arguably the best game of her career.
“I’m just really happy for her,” Smith said. “Confidence is everything in life and in basketball and she is playing with a ton of it right now. When she’s able to knock down some outside shots like she has of late, it forces defenses to close out on her and that opens up our offense more. It was fitting that she’d have basically the game clinching three. With her and Abby (Cox) both being seniors I’m glad they get a shot to play for a county title.”
Junior Taylor Abston had 19 points to lead the way for the Athenians and Madi Hedrick also joined Widmer and Abston in double figures with 10. Riley Gardner and Addie Hodges both ended the game with three. Crawfordsville found it’s hot shooting again drilling 10 threes in the win. Cville went 10-19 (53%) from downtown and 20-47 (43%) from the field.
“As a coach you want to have a great start, which we did (18-6 first quarter), and be able to weather the storm like we did,” Smith said. “It’s good to know that when a team punches you, you’re able to punch back. Every time we were able to answer one of their runs and it always seemed like Madi was one to do it. This is a huge team win for us and is something we can take into break to help us in January.”
The Chargers, as previously stated, had chances throughout the game, but just couldn’t get over the hump. Piper Ramey had 15 points to lead the Chargers in the loss while both Kaydence Young and Jadelyn Phillips both scored seven. Krestyn Bradford added five, Ell McManomy scored three and Madison Banta rounded out the scoring with two.
“Hats off to Crawfordsville because they came in and shot the lights out,” Charger coach Ryan Nuppnau said. “We didn’t do a good job of closing out with high hands and allowed them to have open looks. You take away a couple of threes or the first four minutes of the game where we had our bad start and we probably win. I was telling the girls that we have to reward ourselves because no one else will. When we go down and knock down a shot, we have to reward ourselves with a stop and we just weren’t able to do that tonight.”
The loss for the Chargers sees their record drop to 2-11 (1-2 SAC) on the season and they’ll have a busy week next week as they travel to Rossville on Monday to begin the Delphi Kitchen Classic Tournament against Rossville. North is guaranteed at least three game next week in the new eight-team tournament.
Crawfordsville sees their record improve to 4-9 (1-3 SAC) and they will have plenty of time to rest as they won’t return to action until after the new year on Jan. 3 when they travel to Sheridan.
