Short-handed girls basketball drops home game to La Reina

After losing three key players to stomach flu over break, the girls basketball team lost their first game of the new year to La Reina High School on Thursday, Jan. 7 with a final score of 40-50. The team has been training hard to overcome what has been a month of injuries and illness.“We lost Angelina [Moreno (’16)] at our last tournament—she tore her ACL,” head coach Marisa Silvestri said. “So we actually brought up a freshman, Lilly [Auerbach (’19)], to augment the team while Angelina is out and I was very impressed. She did a great job.”The game played out very similar to their first home game in November. For all of the first and most of the second quarter, Samo maintained an easy lead and seemed like the superior team; the players communicated well, mistakes were infrequent, and defense was strong.“We had a great first half—everyone made good passes and good decisions,” point guard Carissa Cueva (’16) said . “But then in the third quarter, I don’t know. We fell apart.”In the second half, La Reina seemed to become a different (and much better) team. The team was maybe not as unified as Samo’s but had two or three truly exceptional ball-handlers, whose strategy seemed to be to drive to the basket again and again. They were able to out-maneuver Samo more often than not, resulting in an 8 point lead in the end of the third .“The second half was just difficult; they changed their defense which made us a little flustered,” Cueva said. “They got in 3 or 4 lay-ups that we could have easily stopped.”In the coming weeks, Samo will face Ocean League teams with its heavily altered lineup, and will hopefully be able to overcome all the complications of the last month. According to Silvestri, the game was more a victory than a failure.  “This was a really good learning experience and I think the girls actually surprised themselves with how hard they worked,” Silvestri said.The girls play in their first league game at Hawthorne High School on Jan. 13.