Crystal Lake South tops Dundee-Crown

What a difference one win can make.

The Crystal Lake South girls basketball team was joking around a lot more and breathing a collective sigh of relief on Tuesday night following its first win of the season after 5 straight losses.

It looked like the elusive victory would escape the Gators' grasp once again after trailing much of the second half at Dundee-Crown, but they rallied late in the fourth quarter to pull out a 46-42 win in Fox Valley Conference action.

"You never want to sound desperate, but we needed to get a win and we needed it bad," South coach Mark Mucha said. "We turned to our seniors to get us back on the right track and they rose to the challenge. It's the hardest we've played all year. I think our senior group finally started putting things together."

Annika Sevcik is one of the seniors that stepped up big for the Gators. She had a team-high 11 points, including the game-tying basket in the fourth quarter.

"Well the 5 losses have given us a lot of motivation to work on getting better," Sevcik said. "We've learned a lot from those games. The biggest thing is that we need to control the ball and be more patient. We were much better with that tonight. This is a good win to boost our confidence."

The Gators (1-5, 1-1) trailed 23-19 at halftime and were still down 40-36 midway through the fourth quarter. However, they closed out the game with a 10-2 run. Senior Taylor Jozefowicz started it off with a nice turnaround pullup jumper along the far baseline. Then with 2:50 left to play Sevcik tied the game at 40-40 with a driving layup. The Gators took the lead 42-40 with 2:10 left when senior Kelly Gaede scored on a putback basket.

Senior Madelyn Bush added a 3-pointer and Gaede made 1-of-2 free throws down the stretch to help ice the win.

"We certainly didn't have any quit in us," Mucha said. "We stayed battling hard the whole way. Even at halftime they had a lot of confidence that they could turn around and they came out and did that. I thought we took some good steps on defense in the second to limit their top scoring threats Paige Gieseke and (Allison) Michalski. Plus our rebounding which has been a weakness for us was much better tonight."

The Gators had a slight rebounding edge 30-28.

Dundee Crown (1-4, 0-1) went on a 10-0 run at the end of the second quarter to take a 23-19 halftime lead. However, the Chargers were plagued by 23 turnovers in the game, including 9 in the crucial fourth quarter.

"There were moments in this game when we played very well," D-C coach Sarah Miller said. "But then we would turn around and make some poor decisions with the ball. Credit goes to South - they outplayed us and outworked us. They did a good job of extending their zone and putting pressure on the ball. We just have to execute better."

Gieseke led the Chargers with 14 points. Madelyn Tripp had 10 points and 8 rebounds.