By Larry Gage
Special to the PRESS
The Port Isabel High School Lady Tarpons basketball team won its season-opening game over IDEA Quest of Alamo last Friday at home. They led most of the game, including the entire second half, and won 54-30.
“It’s about setting goals and achieving them, and to do that in the first game is really good,” head girls basketball coach, Kyle DeMoss, said afterwards. “We wanted to be up by at least 10 points going into the third quarter, and we wanted to get off to a quick 6-0 run, and we did that.”
It was close in the first half. The visiting Griffins led 5-3 and 11-10 early and were in front 13-10 at the end of the first quarter. Port Isabel outscored IDEA 14-6 in the second quarter and led 24-19 at the break.
The Lady Tarpons opened it up in the second half and the visitors could not keep up. P.I. led 43-26 at the end of three and the winning margin of 24 was the team’s biggest lead of the game.
“I saw a few errors and that’s something we emphasized in practice the last two days, working a couple of different passing drills,” DeMoss said. “They really responded and they did a great job.”
“We never gave up,” Whitney Zaloski said afterwards. “We hustled up and down the court. We ran our plays and we were looking for the open spots.”
“We actually changed our defense to a man-to-man in the fourth quarter and it really messed them up,” Ryley Galvan said. “We did a lot better on offense in the second half.”
Turnovers were a problem, DeMoss said. “We had 12 turnovers early in the first half and that’s entirely too many. Those are the things we’re going to have to get corrected.”
“I put my heart into it,” Mandy Perkins told the Press.
Layni Mata commented on the effects of the change in defense on the IDEA offense;. “It makes a difference by making sure nobody has an open shot, and everybody’s covered so they won’t score easy points on us,” she said.
The next two games are at home for the Lady Tarpons: Frontier High School on Saturday, November 16, and Weslaco East High on Tuesday, November 19. Next weekend, the team will be playing in the Border Brawl tournament in McAllen. This one will run from next Thursday, November 21, through Saturday, November 23.
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