Staff Photo: Travis Rosenau New Ulm Cathedral’s Shay Wilfahrt features a shot in a paint job of Gibbon-Faix-Winthrop’s Nicole Duehn in the first half of Tuesday’s Tomahahawk Division Girls Girls Girls Games Game.
trosenau@nujournal.com
NEWULM – The pack may be smaller this season, but the New Ulm Cathedral Greyhound showed off how much bark and bite will be on Tuesday for Senior Night.
Leading by senior Maddie Jills’ season-high 29 points, the Greyhounds were the best points in the season when they ran past Gibbon Fairfax Wintrop 70-41 in the Tomahawk Valley conference Tomahawk Division Games I’ve won.
The Greyhounds’ points from the previous season were a 65-52 victory over Wabasso on February 1st.
Maddie Jill
“As a team, we were especially senior nights, so I thought we would go out there and play hard.” Jill said. “Everyone was fired quite a bit.”
The Greyhounds have only nine varsity players this season, with the team’s only other senior Olivia Macho adding five points on Tuesday. The macho didn’t fill the scorebook, but her offensive defense helped her carry it into the second half as the Greyhound set the tone early and applied a full-court trap from start to finish.
“I think (our defense) is something we’ve been working on for a while and we’re just sticking to it. We may not work every time, but that’s one of our strongest defenses. So you need to keep it up.” The macho said.
Shay Wilfahrt added 17 points to Greyhounds, while Jayde Altermatt scored 13 points.
GFW was led by Taylor Bauer’s 15 points, while Nicole Dune scored six points.
Olivia Macho
The first three of Gilles’ first three hits in the game brought her team to 10-4, but Bauer responded with And-One on the other end. Thunderbirds went 11-9 on the paint bucket of Keyden Buboltz, but Gilles sank for three seconds in a row to lift the team to 17-9.
“We were trying to open the corner when they were in the zone.” Jill said. “When they were human, we were running a bit of a zero.”
On a 10-0 run, the Greyhounds went up 27-12, and a Trinity Stearns free throw ended the run, reducing GFW to 27-13. That free throw helped the Thunderbirds start what went into a 7-2 run to finish the half as they chased 29-19 at halftime.
The Thunderbirds ended a 9-1 run at 35, with Bauer taking GFW 35-31 after allowing the Greyhounds to extend their lead to 34-21 in the second half. During that run, Altermatt chose the fourth foul of the game, playing with 14:34 left, forcing him to sit in his seat for a few minutes.
It was then unraveled for GFW as the Greyhound press began to be featured again and began to create numerous turnovers for the points in transition. Jill hit a 3 to start what turned into a 10-0 run, with the run finishing with Altermatt’s 3, forcing GFW to burn the timeout to 47-31.
A while later, a successive GFW turnover allowed Jill to hit three seconds of consecutive hits, bringing the Greyhound to 58-33. Another Jill 3 and Willfer layup gave the Greyhound a 63-35 lead. Jill was fouled at 3am and hit all three free throws to give the Greyhounds the biggest night lead, 70-38. Kelly Willegal 3 gave the game the final points with GFW.
The Greyhounds finished the Tomahawks 4-12 and moved to 6-18 overall in the victory, with the Thunderbirds falling 4-19 overall and 2-13 with the Tomahawks.
The Cathedral will be in Nicolette for the 5:45pm game on Thursday, while GFW will be in Sibley East for the 7:15pm game on Thursday.
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