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Harvest Christian downs Freeport

One of the good things about a young team is that youthful exuberance lends to having short memories.

The Harvest Christian girls basketball team suffered a heartbreaking loss in its season opener on Monday, but the Lions have bounced right back with a pair of impressive wins, the latest coming on Friday night as the host Lions defeated Freeport 39-31 in the last round of pool play at the Bill Knox Thanksgiving Invite. Harvest finished second in its pool and will play a crossover game on Saturday against Marian Central.

"As tough a loss as that was on Monday I don't think these girls have thought about it at all," Harvest coach Rich DeTamble said. "They are just eager to play and they listen so well and they want to learn. We have a lot of younger players who have a lot of talent and right now we are in the process of figuring out all their roles."

The Lions' top scoring threat, Alyssa Iverson, had a rare rough night shooting. She missed her first 5 shots and hit just 4-of-15 in the game. However, her teammates picked up the slack. Katie Kaldenberger hit a pair of 3-pointers in the first quarter to propel the Lions to a 12-7 lead.

"Alyssa is such a good player and she is almost always on her game," Kaldenberger said. "But when she is struggling the rest of us know we have to step it up and help her out. We did a real good job of setting up our offense. We passed the ball really well and looked for the open shot. I think that loss in the first game just motivated us to come out and play better in the next two."

Harvest (2-1) opened a 19-7 advantage midway through the second quarter before Freeport was able to trim it to 21-15 by halftime.

The Lions were able to pull away in the third quarter as their defense sparked a 10-0 run to open the second half to extend the lead to 31-15. The Lions had 3 transition baskets off turnovers during the run. Isamar Garcia had a pair of those baskets. Freeport could get no closer than 8 points the rest of the way.

"We are not a big team, but we have a lot of girls quick to the ball," DeTamble said. "So we are going to be able to do a lot of things defensively as the season goes on. Right now we only have about half of our defensive packages in. We are just working on perfecting our 2-3 pressure and our man-to-man and I thought we played both real well tonight. So many of our younger girls stepped up. I thought Gracie Ozburn really stood out on the defensive end. She was like a rocket everywhere and Nygia Pollard had a breakout game with rebounding and handling the ball. She is really coming into her own and has so many intangibles."

Pollard and Jen Kasper each had 7 rebounds to lead the Lions on the boards. Iverson finished with a game-high 11 points. Kaldenberger had 8 points.

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