Rivals Westfield and New Providence faced each other for the first time this season on Jan. 4. The heated game took down Westfield’s undefeated record, giving New Providence a record of 6-1 which now ties with Westfield’s record.
The Blue Devils took a hard hit in the second quarter, coming out of the first quarter tied 11-11. Both teams came out of the first quarter ready to put up a fight and break the tie on the scoreboard. Unfortunately for the Blue Devils, the Pioneers won that battle and closed out the second quarter with a 30-20 lead.
Head coach Liz McKeon said, “In the second quarter they wanted it more. They just outplayed us today, they were ready to go. Their young kids stepped up, they didn’t have much varsity experience but it didn’t seem to affect them at all and their shots were falling and ours weren’t.”
In the second half the Blue Devils could not find the lead again, resulting in a final loss of 58-44. McKeon said, “That second quarter killed us, but [the Blue Devils] did not stop fighting till the end. You know calls aren’t going to go our way, that’s not the difference in the game but I’m proud of the fight we kept for 4 quarters.”
Junior Megan Logan said, “I had pretty strong feelings going into this game. They lost a few players last year and we gained players and I thought we would come out strong which we did but we started to lose it. We tried to come back in the second half and tried to keep going, but they just took it away.”
New Providence’s top two players, senior Brenna Slattery and junior Annie Conover kept adding points to the score, each tallying 19 points for the game. Senior co-captain Catie Carayannopoulos said, “We knew they had two good players we needed to stop. We helped too much on those two and let their other players score. I think it is just a learning experience and we are going to see them again this season and we will know what to do better next time.”
McKeon said, “We can learn defensively what we can do. I was proud of what we tried to do offensively. We are gonna have another shot at them [New Providence], they are in our conference so if we wanna win our conference we gotta step it up and turn the page and move on.”
Moving forward, the Blue Devils look to learn from this game and build on skills they know they have. Carayannopoulos felt the team could work on “3-point defense” and “boxing out better.”
Westfield will face Roselle Catholic on Monday at 4:30 p.m. at WHS. Carayannopoulos said, “We have stuff to work on and I think it’s our first loss so it’s a good test to see how we deal with losing. But, hopefully for the rest of the season, it doesn’t happen again.”
