Feisty Trojans lead at half and hang tough in second game of the season, a 63-49 loss at Northridge on night sophomore guard Lindsi McGuffey again buries four 3-pointers

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

For a girls basketball team as young as Chesterton High School’s, travelling to Middlebury to play Northridge in the second game of the season was tantamount to giving algebra students a trigonometry test in the first week of school.
The Trojans (1-1) lost the game Saturday night but passed the test. They didn’t play tentatively and led with their chins against a much older team armed with two athletic, highly skilled returning double-figure scorers and a post player who knew how to use her muscle in a physical battle.
Northridge won the game, 63-49, but had to come back from a halftime deficit to do it and didn’t pull away until the last few minutes.
A far more experienced Chesterton squad lost to the Raiders by 26 points a year ago. This one was a far more competitive contest.
“Fouls got us,” Chesterton coach Candy Wilson said after a game in which starters Reese Dilbeck and Ella Boyanski fouled out. “That hurt us. But I'm proud of all of them. They left it all out there.”
When Northridge turned up the defensive pressure, it widened the gap, but overall, the Trojans are ahead of most would have guessed.
“We have to refine our offense, and we have some things we have to fix on defense,” Wilson said. “But we got beaten by this team last year by (26 points), and this could have been our game tonight. So this group is hungry, they care about it, and they're fun to coach.”
And fun to watch.
Until getting outscored 12-1 down the stretch, the Trojans answered nearly every big shot from Northridge with one of their own, usually a 3-pointer.
For the second time in as many games, sophomore Lindsi McGuffey scored 14 points and made four 3-pointers. This time she buried one in each quarter.
McGuffey’s final 3-pointer came with 3:35 left and cut Northridge’s lead to 51-48, the end of a 12-2 run for the Trojans.
Allison Van Kley, the lone senior in the seven-player rotation that Wilson used, played a big role in the second game of the season and played all but one minute. As players from both sides showed signs of fatigue, Van Kley’s high energy level stood out. She played aggressively at both ends and scored four of her seven points in the fourth quarter, helping to bring the Trojans back from a double-digit deficit.
How in the world did she summon so much energy so late?
“Cross-country prepares me for basketball season,” Van Kley said. “I know when I'm in better shape, I know I play better and I know we can play faster.”
She wants to maintain her level of conditioning, so after practice she will “run two to three miles every day to stay in shape because that helps the team.”
Van Kley shared her thoughts on why the team was more ready to play Northridge on Saturday than was the case a year ago: “I think really the difference between this year and last year is that everyone wants to be here. Everyone wants to play for each other, not just themselves, so our teamwork and our chemistry is there. That's something that we struggled with a lot last year.”
Northridge, in its second year in the new gymnasium, took command early with 7-2 lead, but the visitors used the 3-point shot to take a 17-14 lead heading into the second quarter. Boyanski (eight points) hit a pair of 3-pointers, first reserve Addison Pack (5 of 8 points in the first quarter) and McGuffey one apiece. Novea Brandon was fouled shooting a 3 with 0.5 seconds left in the quarter and made all three free throws.
Keeping the hot shooting going, Brandon and McGuffey hit 3-pointers in the second quarter and the Trojans led 26-23 at the half.
Neither team scored in the opening three-and-a-half minutes of the third quarter and the Raiders (1-0) went on a 16-4 run that bridged the third and fourth quarters to take an11-point lead.
The Trojans had one more run in them but the bigger, more experienced hosts pulled away at the end.
Pack, a 5-foot-4 sophomore jet with a big vertical leap, brought a big spark off the bench and drove aggressively to the hoop. She explained the driving forces behind her improvement.
“I feel like this past year with AAU, I've definitely grown a lot with my confidence, and I feel like this year everyone's really supporting each other, like, before the game. We all got really hyped and everything. And even after the game, even though we lost, I feel like everyone worked their butts off the entire time and gave their best efforts for sure.”
Van Kley traced it to the work the players do daily in the gym.
“Every single day in practice, we go hard,” she said. “We push ourselves and, you know, I think that's the difference. And that's why this year we were in the game the whole time and last year we lost by (26).”
Wilson praised the players’ effort and how well they played man-to-man defense when not in a 1-3-1 zone.
Next on the schedule for the Trojans is the home opener Friday vs. Munster (1-1).