One of the first and most important coaching milestones is out of the way for Allen womens basketball first-year head coach Rachel Janzen.
On Saturday night, her team rebounded from a rough loss on Friday to Northern Oklahoma College-Tonkawa to soundly put away Bacone College 85-66 for the Lady Devils first win of the season and Janzens first win as a head coach.
Its exciting, Janzen said. Whenever youre a new head coach thats the one that youre kind of waiting on.
And while it wasnt always pretty, the Lady Devils were able to use their speed and their smarts to pressure the Warriors into 15 turnovers which translated into 33 points and a smooth sailing blowout win.
We were trying to play as up-tempo as we can, Janzen said. We basically pressed for the entire game until the end, when I called them off once they started to run out of gas. But thats the way I want to play. Our tempo and our press is a big part of our game and we have the speed to do it.
The Lady Devils stumbled out of the gate and struggled through most of the first quarter ending the period down 22-18.
Clearly frustrated, Janzen called her team together and in a firey timeout speech demanded that things be fixed up.
We werent matched up and then we were getting beat on our press, Janzen said. We just werent organized on offense so I took a timeout and got them reorganized and then we reset.
The lecture worked.
The Lady Devils defense dominated the second quarter, scoring almost two points for every one point from Bacone on their way to a 53-37 halftime lead.
From there, they widened their lead to nearly 30 by the end of the third quarter before letting up on the gas some in the final period.
It was the sophomore leaders who stepped up for the Lady Devils starting with 24 points, four steals and seven rebounds for guard Jaikira Wilson and a massive double-double for Chris-Alee Patterson who had 21 points, 16 rebounds and four steals.
Both (Wilson and Patterson) have been leading us the whole way, Janzen said. They did it all through the summer and now into the season. You can see how much work and time they have put in and now theyre getting the success they deserve.
Freshman point guard Gabby Guzman had 10 points.
