The Crookston Pirates girl’s basketball team held the Bagley Flyers to just seven points in the second half of a 70-16 win in a Section 8AA game played at the Crookston High School Gymnasium.
Crookston’s defense allowed the Pirates to establish a comfortable first-half lead with the host’s jumping out to a 28-3 lead to open the game. Crookston held the Flyers to just nine points in the first half while scoring 44 at the other end as the Pirates took a 44-9 lead into halftime. “It’s not like we scored twenty points in the first two minutes,” Crookston head coach Darrin Zimmerman explained of his team’s strong first half. “It was a methodical start. We were really able to hold them down. They only scored nine points in the first half, and we scored forty-four, so we were able to just build our lead and play consistently good basketball in that first half.”
The second half played out much like the first with Crookston’s suffocating defense limiting Bagley to just seven points in the final 18 minutes as the Pirates closed out a running-time 70-16 win. “I think we played really well in all facets of the game tonight,” said Zimmerman. “We had a good start tonight, and that always helps, and we were able to keep that momentum going throughout the game. We spent a lot of time this week working on our offense. We thought we had a really good chance in our Holiday Tournament to go 2-0 and the big thing that held us up is we didn’t shoot really well.
Part of the reason is that we didn’t have really good spacing and we didn’t run our sets very well, so we spent a lot of time on it the past couple of days and it paid off tonight. We figured that we could be really good defensively this year and we’ve had some games where we’ve really done a good job of doing that and tonight, I think we just took another really good step forward because I saw some things that I hadn’t seen. I think we did a better job of communicating and a better job of rotating, especially on the help-side situation. We hadn’t really been tested or done that as well as we’ve needed to this year and tonight we took a step forward with that as well. It’s a great way to bounce back and that’s one of the things we’ve talked about after our two losses this year. Obviously, we want to win every game, but when we don’t play as well we’ve really responded and tonight was the same.”
The Pirates improve to 9-2 and return to the court next Friday when Crookston travels to Virginia for a 7:30 p.m. tip-off. Bagley drops to 1-9.
| 1st Half | 2nd Half | Final | |
| CROOKSTON | 44 | 26 | 70 |
| Bagley | 9 | 7 | 16 |
| For CROOKSTON | Points |
| Kylie Solheim | 12 |
| Emma Borowicz | 12 |
| Hayden Winjum | 10 |
| Danielle Boyle | 9 |
| Gretchen Theis | 6 |
| Emma Boll | 5 |
| Halle Winjum | 5 |
| Kasey Cwikla | 5 |
| Jenna Coauette | 2 |
| Ally Perreault | 2 |
| Rachel Hefta | 2 |
| For Bagley | Points |
| Kara Bowman | 9 |
| Carly Lewis | 3 |
| Rachael Broten | 2 |
| Kylli Anderson | 2 |
