Friday,
January 23, 2015
By Rich Barton
NJS.com Staff Writer
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Sukhi Kaur had six steals for Lodi, which used its defense to snap Pompton Lakes' winning streak in a 35-25 victory on Thursday. |
LODI – Senior leadership is a luxury. With experience comes poise, which is of vital importance when a team is not playing at its best. That was the case on Thursday when Lodi took a red-hot Pompton Lakes team. With the game still in doubt, the Rams needed one of their five senior starters to step forward and Sukhi Kaur was more than happy to do so.
She had two of her game-high six steals early in the fourth quarter and converted them both into baskets on the other end to provide Lodi with some breathing room as it snapped Pompton Lakes’ six-game winning streak with a 35-25 victory at Lodi High School.
“It was a tough game because we couldn’t get anything going but we had to finish strong,” said Kaur. “With a roster of mostly seniors, it’s frustrating that we’re making the little mental mistakes that a team with so much experience shouldn’t be making, myself included. Even though we’re (9-2), we know we have a lot of room to improve. We don’t have the tallest girls so we have to keep playing fast, force turnovers, and limit turning the ball over ourselves.”
The only hot shooting stretch of the game for either team came from Lodi late in the first quarter. The Cardinals grabbed a 6-0 lead on a jumper from Casey Ramirez but the Rams wasted little time making up the deficit.
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Hannah Zodoyko scored a game-high 15 points for Pompton Lakes. |
After missing their first seven shots from the field, the Rams hit four straight. That included 3s from Kaur and Ariela Nunez to grab a 10-6 at the end of one quarter.
Hannah Zadoyko banked in back-to-back threes midway through the second quarter to cut the lead to two, but Nunez answered right back by rattling home a three-pointer with Lodi taking a 20-14 lead into the locker room.
The lead was still six points after a rainbow three-pointer from Zadoyko a minute into the fourth quarter. Lodi never let it get any closer as Kaur made two steals that led to a jumper and a layup, sandwiched around a free-throw from Lili Vizcaino, that bumped the led back up to double-digits, where it remained for the rest of the game.
“We didn’t shoot the ball well and they turned us over whenever we were trying to make a run,” said Pompton Lakes head coach Matt Hennessy. “Lodi is a good athletic team and they made plays at the right time. We were just coming off of good run over the past two weeks. We’ll learn something from this and hopefully this is just a bump in the road.”
Kaur led Lodi (9-2) with 15 points, six steals, four rebounds, and three assists. Nunez and Lila Reginald each chipped in with six points. Zadoyko (15) and Ramirez (9) combined for all but one of the 25 points scored by Pompton Lakes (6-5).
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Lila Reginald and Lodi are now 9-2 on the season. |
After opting not to enter the Bergen County Tournament, Lodi is turning its attention toward finishing out the league schedule strong and getting a good seed for the North 1, Group 2 state tournament. But if the Lady Rams plan on making any type of run in the states, scoring in the half-court and their level of play as a whole will need to be raised significantly.
“Even though we should feel really good because we just beat a good team, to get to next level we need to a better job of what we do with the ball,” said Lodi head coach Alyson Gorski. “Our goal is to get better as the season goes on and peak at the end in the state tournament. Right now we’re still trying to find that consistency from quarter to quarter, game to game. The good thing that came out of today is that we did not play very well offensively but made enough plays to find a way to win. That ended up working out today, ut as the games get tougher, we won’t be able to get away with this type of effort and expect to win.”
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