Huron girls' basketball team competes against Aberdeen Central
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ABERDEEN — The Golden Eagles saw what was once a 13-point lead early in the fourth quarter dwindle to just a single point late in the fourth, but emerged from Monday’s twice-rescheduled battle with Huron with a 57-54 victory.
It was Central’s second win in three days, but it didn’t come easily.
The Golden Eagles gave up 14 offensive rebounds to the Tigers as a whole and 28 points to Huron’s Havyn Heinz. Sami Shoultz also put the ball on the floor and scored some easy buckets for the Tigers, who seemed determined to upend Central’s fledgling confidence, born out of a Saturday night win over Watertown.
And the Golden Eagles bent as far as they could under that pressure. Cassidy Gough and Emma Yeske spent much of the third quarter watching from the sidelines, plagued with foul trouble.
In their stead, however, rose a supporting cast led by Brooklyn Kusler in the first half, Jianna Gellhaus and Kyra Griese in the third quarter, and Abby Kopecky in the fourth. The Golden Eagles bent plenty, but didn’t break.
“It’s good for our kids,” said Central coach Dawn Seiler of the win. “The thing I was pleased about was that we had so many kids step up at different times. Kusler owned the first half. They had to pay a lot of attention to her that second half. Then Abby stepped in that fourth quarter, Kyra Griese for a couple minutes in that third quarter, just played so hard and made a lot of things happen.”
Kusler scored 15 of her 19 points in the first half, staking Central to a slim 24-22 lead. A back-and-forth third eventually gave way to a little Golden Eagle run featuring 3-pointers from Griese and Jianna Gellhaus and a runner in the lane from Melanie Jacobs — her only two points of the night. Gellhaus continued the torrent with an early fourth-quarter trey, and Central held a 49-36 lead with six and a half minutes to play.