New chairs complete gym’s new look Lady Mustangs lose to Lady Pioneers
ANDERSON —The Gentry Lady Pioneers got off to a fast start against the Lady Mustangs of McDonald County and never looked back en route to a 49-33 win in the game for seventh place in the 2022 Lady Mustang Classic on Wednesday, Dec. 14, in Mustang Arena.
Gentry (7-5) held McDonald County (4-6) to five points in the opening quarter while scoring 13 on the strength of 3-pointers from Kaitlyn Caswell, Alyssa McCarty and Emma Tevebaugh.
McCarty and Tevebaugh would add a three each in the second quarter to push Gentry’s lead to 28-14 at the intermission before the Lady Pioneers outscored the Lady Mustangs, 14-8, in the third quarter. McDonald County won the fourth quarter by an 11-7 count.
“They shot it well, but we’ve got to finish,” said McDonald County coach Sean Crane. “If we make a couple of easy ones, we’d have been in good shape.”
Gentry coach Toby Tevebaugh was also concerned with the way his team finished in the lane.
“We missed a few around the basket I’d like to have seen us finish, but overall I thought we did a nice job of setting the tempo,” he said.
And that tempo was of the fast variety.
“We thought we had a little bit of a team speed advantage on them,” he said. “They were bigger and more physical than us, but we thought we had some speed on them and were just trying to speed the game up and get some opportunities in transition.”
Carlee Cooper led the Lady Mustangs in scoring with 10 points. She was followed in her team’s scoring column by Carlie Martin with seven points, Roslynn Huston with five and Analisa Ramirez with four. Layla Wallian, Megan Elwood and Rylee Anderson finished with two points each and Natalie Gillming one.
“At the moment, we’ve got a lot of young talent and when we have opportunities we’re going to play them,” Crane said, “because someday it’s not going to be for them to come in and get experience. Some day we’re going to need them to play the whole darn game. We’ve got a very good, young nucleus and a lot of depth; we’ve just got to figure out how to use that depth to fix our problems.”
McCarty and Emma Tevebaugh led the Lady Pioneers with 16 and 11 points, respectively. Shelby Still scored eight points and Reese Hester seven, with Caswell netting five and Brynn Cordeiro two.
“We’ve been on a rough stretch,” said the Gentry coach. “This was our fifth game in six days, and then we’ve got an away game (Dec. 15) in conference. We looked a little tired and sluggish to me from where we’re at normally.”
As for playing in the classic, he said, “We played some really good teams here this week. Carl Junction’s got a great team, and this Farmington team is really good. I felt like our side of the bracket was extremely strong, so it was really good for us to get tested and pushed.”
Crane said he thought the Lady Mustangs “played OK the first two nights,” adding, “I didn’t think we played great tonight, honestly. I thought we played OK (in Tuesday night’s 38-35 loss to Webb City) and gave ourselves a chance to win, but did not finish. I thought we played really well for parts of the first round (a 51-37 loss to Fort Smith Southside), but tonight we didn’t play up to our potential, and I don’t know why.”