Lewis Cass’ girls basketball team was defeated by visiting Northfield 44-36 Wednesday night to fall to 0-3 on the season.
The Kings were outscored 12-6 in the decisive fourth quarter.
“We didn’t score in the third and fourth quarters very well,” Cass coach Lindsay Leffert said. “They outscored us in every quarter but the first, but the fourth quarter was basically the story. [Abby] Ropes was in foul trouble, and I didn’t put her back in until four minutes were left. Maybe I could have put her in earlier.
“It’s one of those things where you go back and watch the film, and obviously as a coach figure out what went wrong. How come we couldn’t score? ... We had good chances to score, but I didn’t take advantage. But give credit to Northfield. They hustled their tails off and outplayed us, outworked us.”
Adrienne Ayers led the Kings with 16 points and five rebounds. Ropes scored 10 points.
Carley Mast led the Norsemen (2-1) with a game-high 18 points.
“We had a lot of opportunities to get Mast out of the game when she had four fouls, but we didn’t take advantage,” Leffert said.
The Kings were outrebounded 32-18 for the game, which upset their coach.
“[Northfield’s] leading rebounder was 5-3,” Leffert said. “It was just a really bad job on our part of blocking out and crashing the boards. One of our keys to winning going in was blocking out ... a lot of it is hustle.”
The Kings open up their Mid-Indiana Conference slate on Saturday night when they host Eastern.
