Wheaton North puts its progress on display

If Wheaton North is a young girls basketball team that's a work in progress, so far things seem to be progressing pretty well.

The Falcons remained undefeated on the season with a 53-43 victory against Minooka at the Lyons Twp. Thanksgiving Tournament in LaGrange.

"We're getting there," said Wheaton North coach Dave Eaton, who played three sophomores and a freshman. "We're still learning. You could see we had a nice third quarter there and started to play the way I thought we can play. We got out and defensively sort of got our offense going a little bit and that lighted it up. ... But again, we're just trying to put it together for four quarters, and that's part of being young."

The Falcons (3-0) are having fun and working hard, getting into the gym Friday morning ahead of the midafternoon tipoff to prepare, diagraming the Minooka plays that they watched on film.

"It's always going to be different if you have new players," said Falcons senior guard Nikki Baird, a Belmont recruit, "but this group has really stepped up and made it easy for me being a senior. And this group, everyone from 1 to I think we have 18 players, everyone is working their tails off in practice every single day and that's the thing I'm really proud of."

"I just give them credit, they're really dedicated to the process and it shows because we're further along than I think where a lot of people thought we'd be," Eaton added.

One of three returning seniors who played, Baird scored a game-high 30 points. Like a leader, she deflected credit to her teammates.

"Honestly, it's just my teammates grinding in practice," Baird said. "We're all good with that offense, and it's new, and so it's hard for a team with a lot of new players to learn it and we picked it up really quickly. So just scoring within the offense, and our defense is really what started it."

The third quarter was a work of art for the Falcons. Tied at halftime, the Falcons outscored Minooka 21-2 to take a 45-26 lead into the fourth quarter.

"That starts with our defense, and that's not me, that's our whole team," Baird said. "And we talked about at halftime how we weren't being aggressive enough. We track our defensive plays, like deflections and stuff, and we didn't have enough. So we just came into the third quarter with the mentality that we wanted to turn it up on defense and that's what we did."

Minooka trimmed the Falcons' lead to 51-43 with 1:31 to play on a Sophie Darden basket. The Falcons held Minooka scoreless the final 91 seconds to secure the victory.

"We just had to put the game away, and we did a good job at the end of finally controlling it once we got into those last couple of minutes," Baird said.

Senior Cierra Bachmann led Minooka with 10 points. Junior Brooke McNally added 8.