MITCHELL — The Mitchell girls basketball team was hanging around with Class AA No. 4-ranked Sioux Falls O’Gorman for the first 21 and a half minutes.
But in the final 2:36 seconds of the third quarter, the Knights turned a five-point lead into a 14-point lead, going on a swift 9-0 run to close out the frame and charging ahead en route to a 59-39 win over Mitchell on Senior Night at the Corn Palace on Friday.
“The last two minutes of the third quarter it just seemed like it just slipped away on us,” head coach Dave Brooks said.
Lauren Van Overschelde, who had a season-high 18 points, scored the final five points of the first quarter to bring Mitchell to within one after eight minutes. The Knights padded their lead in the second quarter, taking a 28-19 lead to break, but it was the third quarter that plagued Mitchell.
O’Gorman consistently worked the ball down low, finding open cutters and using its height to rack up 14 points in the paint in the third quarter alone.
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“They kind of went into the middle a little bit and (Clare Benson) put it on the floor a little bit,” Brooks said of the second-half adjustments he saw from O’Gorman.
Outside of Van Overschelde, Sawyer Stoebner tallied nine points and 14 rebounds, while Addie Siemsen picked up seven points. The Kernels shot 26% (13-for-50) as a team from the floor and committed 22 turnovers in the defeat.
The 20-point loss also matched the largest margin of defeat of the season for Mitchell.
“I don’t know that we could’ve done anything differently to win,” Brooks said. “They truly beat us.”
The Kernels fell to 8-11 with the loss, dropping their fifth game in a row. The five losses have all come to teams ranked above them in the Class AA standings, including the top-three teams in Sioux Falls Washington, Pierre and O'Gorman.
The Kernels close out their regular season Saturday, Feb. 25, on the road against Brandon Valley in a makeup game that was originally scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 21. After that, Mitchell turns its attention to the SoDak 16, where it will be on the road against an opponent that’s to be determined on Friday, March 3.
“(With) our kids, there’ll be enough confidence going, ‘Why not us?’” Brooks said of going into the SoDak 16 having faced the top teams in the class. “We’ve faced them all, right? So it’s not like we don’t know who we’re going to see.”
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