By Teddy Rydquist
Leader Staff Writer
After trailing by two points at the halftime break, the Oxford Wildcats girls’ basketball team found themselves looking up at an 11-point deficit midway through the third quarter of their game with the Berkley Bears at the Ian Smith Gymnasium on February 18.
Maintaining their composure, the Wildcats were able to trim the gap to five after 24 minutes and rallied back to beat the Bears, 46-45, to improve to 2-2 (2-1 Oakland Activities Association Blue Division).
Senior Emma Morris led Oxford with 15 points, while classmate Mackenzie “Mackie” Methner, who scored the game-winning bucket with slightly more than 10 seconds to play, finished with 11. In a losing effort, junior Ashley Loon scored a game-high 20 for Berkley, tallying 10 in each half.
“The fact that the girls were able to change up their defense and put a little pressure on them,” head coach Rachel Bryer said of what helped swing the contest in the Wildcats’ favor. “That’s been kind of our downfall, we’ve been figuring that out, we’ve been working on it. But for them to come through and be able to run that press, really helped us out tonight. It got us some open looks and open steals that we needed.”
Morris, the team’s leading scorer at 11.2 points-per-game, was held scoreless in the first half, registering all 15 of her points in the final 16 minutes.
Following Oxford’s 44-35 victory over the Lake Orion Dragons on February 12, a tilt where she finished with 10 points, Morris returned to the floor and put up some shots as the gymnasium was clearing out. Against the Bears, this commitment to her craft and extra work paid dividends.
“We just keep on giving Emma confidence that her shot will start to fall, and she’ll do fine, and to keep shooting and not to stop shooting,” Bryer said. “She listens, and she doesn’t stop shooting. If it’s falling, it’s falling, if it’s not, she works on it and finds a way to score.”
A sign of things to come and a moment she will likely remember for a long time, junior Kayla Casper, who received a call-up to the varsity team for the playoff run at the end of the 2019-20 season, recorded her first two varsity points in the second quarter.
“Kayla works hard, Kayla is a workhorse,” Bryer said. “You tell her to go do something or play defense or play a position, she’s going to do it and she’s going to do it with all that she can. “She’s still learning and figuring things out, trying to work on her game and find a place, but I could see Kayla getting some minutes here and there in a game and really figuring out where she fits on the team.”
The Wildcats hit the road to battle another OAA Blue foe, the Avondale Yellow Jackets, on February 23. Results were not available in time for this edition but will be covered in the March 3 issue.The girls play another road game on Thursday against the Troy Athens Red Hawks, a home game with Romeo on Friday and travel to Berkley on Monday, March 1.