HURON — The Viborg-Hurley girls basketball team is back at the Class B state tournament.
That was bad news for Howard on Thursday night.
The Cougars, the defending champions in the class and the No. 3 seed in the tournament, were flying around the court with their high-pressure defense and drilled 10 3-pointers, flying past the sixth-seeded Tigers for a 64-46 win at the Huron Area in the state quarterfinal round.
The Cougars (21-3) have won 26 in a row against opponents from Class B, including moving to 16-0 in those games this season. They’ll put that streak on the line in the Class B semifinals on Friday against second-seeded Ethan at 7:45 p.m.
“They’re the defending state champions for a reason,” Howard coach Wade Erickson said. “There’s a reason why they’ve lost to one Class B school in the last two years. It’s just once they get it rolling, they are so difficult to stop. … They’re all feeling it and they’re a big momentum team.”
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Viborg-Hurley forced 15 turnovers from the Tigers on 14 steals and even when the Cougars weren’t taking the ball away, they were putting the Howard guards under siege and frustrating their offense. Senior guard Coral Mason was the primary pocket-picker, finishing with nine points, 13 rebounds and seven steals.
“It got them into their game and it took us out of our game,” Erickson said. “We just panicked a little bit. Our guards are skilled and they’ve seen presses all year long and I just think there were some state tournament jitters a little bit.”
After a tepid 6-5 first quarter, in which the Cougars were 3-for-14 shooting, V-H opened up the offense in the second period, hitting five of their next seven shots to open the lead out to 22-13 and later extending it to 31-22. Denae Mach had 15 points in the first half and Estelle Lee scored 13, later finishing the game with 25 and 19 points, respectively. The Cougars stretched the lead to 18 points midway through the fourth quarter to seal the trip back to the Class B final four.
“We’ve had pressure all year long and that was the one thing I said in the pregame speech, is that we’ve dealt with that since the first game of the season,” V-H coach Molly Mason said. “So the slow start wasn’t going to bother us if we just kept playing.”
“That’s the one thing we’ve been focusing on, is our full-court pressure defense,” Mason continued. “We had to make sure we had active hands and slowing down their offense. It wasn’t always about getting the steal but we wanted to take some time off the shot clock and not let them get into their offense as easily.”
Howard finished shooting 28% in the game and 27% in the second half. Abby Aslesen had 17 points and 11 rebounds, and was 7-for-7 at the free-throw line. Trinity Palmquist had 13 points and Kate Connor scored eight points for the Tigers (19-5), who will play Castlewood in the consolation bracket on Friday afternoon.
“We’ve got to learn from it and bounce back (on Friday),” Erickson said. “Because we’ve got another tough one and we want to finish the season as best we can.”
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