HTC girls roll New London 54-22

FORT MADISON – New London’s girls' basketball team showed up with seven players Friday night at Shottenkirk Gym and had a hard time keeping up with Holy Trinity’s Lady Crusaders.
Holy Trinity rolled to a 54-22 win over the Lady Tigers and at one point led by as much as 35 points in the Southeast Iowa Super Conference win. The Crusaders improve to 2-5 on the year and 2-4 in the conference and have won their last two games after starting 0-5.
Aside from the 2-2 tie at the outset, the Crusaders took off on a tear pulling away to a 19-4 lead on 8 of 16 first quarter shooting led by Adalyn Kruse’s 10 points.
New London missed six of their first eight shots and didn’t get a single offensive rebound as Kruse, Olivia Bendlage, and Makayla Simpson dominated inside play. Holy Trinity held the Tigers to just one offensive rebound in the game.
“I haven’t seen the rebound totals yet, but that’s one thing we try to do is double people up on rebounds,” said HTC Head Coach Shawn Hopper.
He said despite New London’s 0-6 record coming into the game after the holidays, he wasn’t looking past them.
“The way our season’s gone, I’m not about to take anyone for granted. We did some good things and there were some things we wanted to work on, but I wasn’t going to run that up.”
Holy Trinity would have a 32-9 lead at the end of the first half with Kruse leading the way with 14 points.
New London got a 3-pointer from Evelyn Adams in the third period, their only points of the quarter, but they outscored HTC 10-7 in the final period behind a couple 3-balls from senior Megan Lee.
Hopper said the Crusaders were a little gassed because of some illnesses that swept through the squad over the break.

“I’m glad we had this game before we play Mepo on Tuesday,” he said.
“We’ve still got some girls sick. Just about everyone had the sniffles last week and we’re just getting over that. We worked on a lot of stuff over the break in practice, but we couldn’t do a lot because everyone was under the weather.”
The Crusaders had a little pressure to open the second half, but took it off fairly quickly.
“It’s something we wanted to work on and I’m not sure we’ll get to press Tuesday.
Holy Trinity hosts Mediapolis on Tuesday night. The 9-0 Bulldogs (6-0 in SEISC play) are currently ranked 10th in Class 3A and will present multiple issues for the Crusaders.
Hopper said to stay in the game Holy Trinity will have to play controlled basketball on both ends.
“We’re gonna talk about defense and breaking that press. We’re not going to throw in anything new, we don’t have time for that, so the way you win that game is play good defense, break their press, and avoid turnovers,” he said.
We’re going to try and slow it down a little and we tried that tonight, too. We wanted to go a little deeper into the shot clock. We have more success when we run our offense and get a couple reverses.”
Bendlage finished with 20 points on the night, nine in the third period. Kruse had 16. Lee led New London with 11 points.
After Tuesday’s matchup with Mediapolis, the girls host Central Lee in a rematch of a Dec. 2 52-24 loss to the Hawks.