BASKETBALL: Lady Panthers get off to a fast start at Ham-Co Tourney
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[The Lady Panthers started off their 2011 season with a bang on Tuesday night, blowing past Gallitin County 69-31 in their first game at the 2011 Hamilton County Lady Foxes Basketball Tournament.
Katelyn Mayer was the only player for Pinckneyville to score double figures with 13 points, but a total of eight Lady Panthers had at least 6 points on the night.
"One thing I've been really proud about in practices that carried over to this game is that we share the ball pretty well," said Lady Panthers' head coach Alan Engelhardt. "We had a lot of girls in the 6-9 point range, when you share the ball like that and they don't' know who they're guarding, if you look at our shot chart everything was around the rim. We shared it, we got open looks and we ran the floor well."
Pinckneyville led 24-15 after one and 38-21 at the half before turning up the defense in the third period. The Lady Panthers outscored Gallitin County 18-5 over those eight minutes en route to the easy victory.
Others scoring for PCHS included Heather McDaniel (8 points), Haley Simpson (8), Britney Thomas (8), Lindsey Winter (7), Dani Schoenbacher (6), Keelyn Stein (6), Alexis Anderson (6), Alyssa Hirsch (5) and Haley Szczepanski (2).
Anderson led rebounding with 6, Mayer had the team-high in steals with 5, and Winter, McDaniel, Mayer, Hirsch and Schoenbacher each had 3 assists.
"We're finding ourselves," Engelhardt said. "They've been fun in practice, they've listened."
"We talked about, defensively, that we could pressure people with this group and I thought we did a decent job of that, especially in the second half. We jumped out on the ball screens better and took away that, so we're hoping that we can get up and down, pressure, and score some cheap baskets."
Pinckneyville (1-0) is back in action at the Hamilton County Tournament on Wednesday night, taking on the host Lady Foxes at 7:30 p.m.
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