By Noah Dalton
CAMPBELLSBURG — Mitchell High School took the court on Thursday, looking to bounce back in Patoka Lake Athletic Conference play after starting the season after dropping their first two conference matchups.
Standing on the other side of the court this time around was West Washington, who were unbeaten in PLAC games heading into the night after beating Perry Central in their most recent outing.
After a slow start from the Bluejackets, the Senators walked away with the win by a final score of 42-21 to sit atop the conference as the lone 2-0 team.
Things turned south for Mitchell after a slow first quarter, which saw the Bluejackets held scoreless, as West Washington got off to a 13-0 lead. It wasn’t until a couple of minutes into the second quarter that Mitchell got on the board, on their way to scoring just five points in the half.
At the break, the Bluejackets trailed 24-5, with the team’s 12 first-half turnovers against West Washington’s full-court press defense playing a key role.
Mitchell head coach Dakota Brasher attributed some of those mistakes to bad decision making with the ball, also acknowledging some fundamental issues that the team continues to work to solve.
“I think we play really hard. Some of that needs to get transferred to playing smart. We have some silly passes sometimes.
We have some silly mistakes. It’s fundamentals that we work on two, three times, four times a week in practice as far as passing. We do it in our warm-up,” said Brasher.
“We’re really, really close. I truly believe that, to everything kind of clicking and carrying over on the offensive end. Most teams at this point in the year are further ahead defensively than offensively, and that’s our case. Our effort is really good, but we’ve got to start playing smarter and start being able to execute a little bit and we’ll get there.”
It was a better showing for Mitchell in the second half, where they scored 16 points compared to the handful they netted across the first two periods.They also managed to outrebound the Senators in the second half, pulling down 11 boards compared to eight from them after West Washington had dominated that category earlier in the evening.
Still, the deficit from the first half proved to be too much for the Bluejackets to overcome, with the Senators cruising to a 21-point victory.
“We challenged them. Our struggle is not in the half court. It’s not necessarily even half court offensively. It’s in those transition spots. It’s when the shot goes up. It’s the press breaks. It’s the little stuff. It’s the special stuff, and we’ve got to keep getting it done,” said Brasher.
West Washington’s Jayla Batt led all scorers with 23 points on the night, earning nine of her points from the free-throw line in 17 attempts. She also grabbed 11 rebounds to lead in that category as well.
Mitchell had two players each scoring six points leading the way for them, those being Raylee Thompson and Raylee Blackwell. Both did all of their scoring in the second half.
Improved stretches for the Bluejackets, like tonight’s second half, show the potential for where this young team could be headed in the future, though Brasher said they’ll have plenty of work to do if they want to get there.
“We’re just evaluating and making things better as we can. It was disappointing to see the digress in the press break tonight. I thought we had that kind of figured out.
But we really rebounded well tonight after the first quarter, which is a plus. We still need to limit turnovers, and we still need to execute offensively at a better rate than we did.”
The Bluejackets will head onto the court again on Saturday, making the long trip to Vincennes to take on Vincennes Rivet with a 1 p.m. tip-off.
