Kaneland rolls over Sterling

The first 10 minutes of Friday night's Northern Illinois Big 12 crossover girls basketball game between Kaneland and Sterling could simply be described as the Jenni Weber show.

A scorching-hot Weber tallied 17 of Kaneland's first 21 points and finished with a game-high 25 points on 10-of-12 shooting as the host Knights rolled to a 64-42 victory in Maple Park.

"It felt good. We were shooting yesterday and I was shooting well in practice and it just carried over," Weber said, as she hit nothing but net on all five 3-point attempts. "Everyone did a great job getting the ball to me."

"I thought our team in general was pretty unselfish tonight. Jenni was hot and we kept looking for her," said Kaneland coach Ernie Colombe. "It's good to see her have success early on because when she's hitting it opens up a lot of other things for us."

Kaneland (14-2, 6-1) forced 9 second quarter turnovers primarily from its 1-3-1 press and put together an impressive 16-4 run to extend its halftime lead to 37-20.

Knights' point guard Jamie Martens scored 6 of her 8 points during that stretch and handed out 2 of her game-high 6 assists.

"Jamie's a point guard who is capable of scoring double figures on any given night, but she tries to get other people going first. She has that quality and we're very lucky," Colombe said.

"Once one of us gets going, everything opens up," Jenni Weber said. "We moved the ball really well tonight."

Senior Morgan Weber provided a large portion of the Knights' scoring in the second half, collecting 12 of her 16 points. She went 7-for-7 from the line and also grabbed a team-high 7 rebounds.

"It was just kind of my turn, so I took it. Me and J-Web shared the ball in the second half so that was pretty nice," Morgan Weber said.

Kaneland led by as many as 30 points before emptying the bench over the final six minutes.

"Earlier in the year we felt like we were playing maybe two to two and a half good quarters, but we're starting to see that extended a little bit now to three, three and a half quarters," Colombe said.

Cheyenne Harrington paced Sterling (3-15, 0-5) with 12 points while Mya Pearson added 8.