Lady Titans off to hot start
Audrey Plunkett shoots during a practice at Carl Albert on Friday morning. Photo by Jeff Harrison
By Jeff Harrison
Midwest City Beacon
The season couldn’t have started much better for the Carl Albert girls basketball team.
The Lady Titans went 8-0 in December including 4-0 in district play and won the Southern Oklahoma Invitational in Duncan for the fifth straight year.
“We beat Lawton Ike in the semifinals in a very physical game and then came back and beat Moore who had a lot of size,” said coach Kyle Richey. “I was worried about our legs after that physical game, but they rose to the occasion. They did not want to be the team that didn’t win that tournament, after we’d done it four years in a row before.”
The Carl Albert girls have been getting it done on both ends of the floor. They’re averaging 66.1 points per game, while allowing only 31.4 points per game.
“We’ve put up some points on the board this year, but I think our defense has been a key cog,” Richey said. “Our defense leads us to getting easier shots.”
Offensively, the Lady Titans have a balanced scoring attack. The team has had five different leading scorers in games this season. Jakary Brown has scored 20 or more points three times. Audrey Plunkett, Evi Mitchell, Jordan Richardson and Meliah Hatchett have also led the team in scoring so far this year.
“We’re pretty unselfish and we just go with whoever has the hot hand that night,” Mitchell said.
The Lady Titans have had a light schedule this holiday break. They played two games in the past couple of weeks and had a couple of scrimmages.
The road gets more difficult this week. The Lady Titans will travel to Bartlesville Jan. 9-11 for the ConocoPhillips/Arvest Tournament. They open against Stillwater and will face Bartlesville or Tulsa Central the next day. Del City, Life Prep, Broken Arrow and Millwood are on the other side of the bracket.
It will be their first appearance in the tournament in three years. The Lady Titans played in the Bertha Frank Teague Mid-America Classic the past two years.
The following week, Carl Albert travels to Lawton MacArthur (Jan. 16) and Elgin (Jan. 17) on back-to-back nights.
“We’re looking forward to playing some bigger competition,” Brown said.
Plunkett said they want to also prove they can win close games. Their closest margin of victory this season was an eight-point win over Guymon.
“We want to show that we can really play and not just blow teams out,” she said.
