West Hancock girls humble Lady Hounds

FORT MADISON - The lesson Fort Madison girls basketball coach Landon Bentley wants his team to take away from Monday’s 74-40 loss to West Hancock wasn’t so much how the Bloodhounds made an early second-half run on the Titans, but more about their opponent’s response.
Fort Madison, which trailed 23-2 7 ½ minutes into the game, got to within 37-24 less than 30 seconds into the second half. But the Titans answered with a 13-2 run, and any hopes the Bloodhounds had of getting closer were gone.
“So we're going to go to film and talk about when they started to make mistakes,” Bentley said. “
“You don't see their rise and fall as much as you see ours. Where, OK, we come out and we hit him in the mouth, and get to within 13 and then their composure never changed. And they come back down and hit a couple more shots, and you could see it almost sucked the life out of us, and it was like, ‘That was our chance.’ We kind of played it like that was our only chance to come back, and that was it. And we've got to get out of that mindset. We've got to compete the whole time.”
“That’s what we’re supposed to do,” West Hancock coach Jerry Jerome said of his team’s response. “We're pretty good at, after giving up eight or nine (points), we then get nine or 10 or 12 back. I don't say anything to them. I just think it's what they see in the leadership that we have out there.”
The Titans (14-1), coming off a championship in the Lady Tiger Classic after defeating top-ranked Brown County in the title game, gave Jerome the response he wanted in his team’s first game out of the holiday week.

“We’re back in school now, and you’re always worried about how they’re going to play,” Jerome said. “Fort Madison has a nice team, they play hard. But I was just happy with how we played.”
The Bloodhounds (4-4) couldn’t make shots to start the game, with their offense struggling against West Hancock’s pressure defense. They didn’t get their first field goal until Hadley Wolfe’s layup with 13 seconds remaining in the first quarter.
“They took us out of sorts with their press,” Bentley said. “You can’t turn the ball over 25 times in a game, 14 in the first half, like we did. They put some pressure on Hadley. They were physical with her, and it didn’t get called, but you’ve got to play through and work your way around it.”
Fort Madison was down 23-7 at the end of the first quarter and 37-20 at halftime, but the Bloodhounds closed the first half with a 6-2 run, then scored the first four points of the second half before the Titans took back the momentum.
Maci Haas led West Hancock with 30 points. Scarlet Yuskis had 16 points. Lucy Woodworth had 11.
Wolfe led the Bloodhounds with 15 points. Dayonna Davis had 13.