BENDLAGE
John Bohnenkamp for Pen City Current Sports
WAYLAND — Mary Kate Bendlage got Holy Trinity’s girls basketball team off to a big start in Monday’s season opener against WACO.
Then her teammates started scoring as well.
The result was a 62-31 win for the Crusaders, and what coach Tony Johnson expects to be a blueprint for his team this season.
Four Crusaders scored in double figures — Natalie Randolph led with 19 points, Bendlage had 15, Presley Myers had 12 points and Teagan Snaadt had 10.
“MK is going to get her points,” Johnson said of Bendlage, who ranked seventh in the state in scoring last season at 23.9 points per game. “And then teams are going to start keying on her and everyone else is going to get involved. We’ve got a legit six players who can score like that, and that’s going to be hard to defend.”
Holy Trinity started the game with a 14-0 run in the first 2:08, with Bendlage getting 12 of the points and Snaadt getting the other two.
Randolph, who missed all of last season with a knee injury, then scored five points in the span of 96 seconds, and then Snaadt scored on a layup to give the Crusaders a 21-7 lead at the end of the first quarter.
Myers, who ran into some first-quarter foul trouble, came back in the second quarter and scored three consecutive times to help push the lead to 35-12. Then the third quarter was a mix of baskets from Snaadt, Randolph and Myers. The lead at that point was 58-22, and there was a running clock for the rest of the game.
“It’s good to get Natalie back — she’s moving well and she’s so smooth at getting points,” Johnson said. “Presley had some big shots, and Teagan knocked down her open shots. When we start hitting outside shots, and with what we have inside, we’re going to be a hard team to guard.”
Johnson liked the way his team kept the pressure on the Warriors throughout the game.
“There were times last year where we would have slow starts, or we would come out slow in the third quarter,” he said. “We emphasized at halftime tonight to finish what we started, not letting them get back in it, and I thought we did that.”
Brenna Graber led WACO with 10 points.
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