BATESVILLE — It was a tale of two halves for the Hauser girls basketball team in its season opener Friday night at Batesville.
The Jets executed better in the second half but a rough start in the first half proved to be the difference in a 60-29 loss.
A lot of shots were not falling for Hauser early on, and it managed only three field goals in the first half. The Bulldogs took advantage to jump out to a 15-4 lead after the first quarter and a 28-6 lead at halftime.
“We got the shots that we wanted to, but we got no offensive rebounding,” Hauser coach Brad Hamilton said. “We eventually got offensive rebounding, and we made shots and that makes a huge difference. I thought the kids played hard. I didn’t have an issue with the effort. I didn’t think we had consistent ball pressure, and we were walking the ball instead of attacking.”
After Batesville extended the lead to 37-8 in the third quarter, Hannah Johnson scored six straight points for the Jets to cut it to 37-14. The teams traded points the rest of the third quarter with Hauser trailing 42-19.
Johnson finished with a team-high 12 points for the Jets, while Bree Hadley added five. Johnson had the potential to make a strong difference in the game, but foul trouble limited her minutes throughout the game.
“She made an impact coming out of that third quarter, so if we can get her going, she is a threat offensively,” Hamilton said. “Another thing I saw was that we settled for too many perimeter shots instead of going inside and working it out.”
Both teams then emptied the benches for much of the fourth quarter.
Hamilton is optimistic that his team can fix its issues for a busy slate of games next week.
“I saw some improvement from last week, and I saw some things that we can build on,” Hamilton said. “It’s a young team. We have three kids that played tonight that have never played a varsity game before. We’ll learn from it. As far as I’m concerned, (Batesville) is a really good team. It is not the way I wanted to start the season, but it is also a good opponent that could make some noise in Class 3A this year.”
