As much experience as the Cardinal Huskies girls’ basketball team gained last year, there is still a lot of work to be done. The Huskies could not measure up to LaBrae and were defeated by the Vikings 59-43 last Friday evening in Leavittsburg.
“They were a shooting team, and they also know how to pass the ball quite well so they did a very good job of that,” said Coach Kim Domen. “It was going to be a tough battle for us, but we battled through.”
After winning two of its first three games this year, Cardinal (2-2, 0-0) faced its first true challenge of the season against a Vikings’ team that handed them a resounding 69-50 defeat last year just before the playoffs began. Although the two programs belong to different conferences, once the Huskies officially join the Northeastern Athletic Conference next year, the second-year coach can foresee the teams becoming more familiar with each other.
On Friday night, the Vikings took a commanding 23-9 lead in the first quarter. According to Domen, LaBrae demonstrated pristine ball movement that led to open shooters out on the perimeter; the Vikings knocked down three 3-point shots.
In addition to a fast offensive start, Domen added that the Vikings’ defense forced Cardinal to run the ball from up high, which was not in its comfort zone, and stalled the offense.
After a slow start on offense, sophomore Ivy Kaminski attempted to ignite the Huskies by scoring nine points.
“Ivy is a competitor,” Domen said of the sophomore who finished the game by scoring 24 points. “She always has been our leading scorer and our leading rebounder. She gets down on herself but Ivy coming out in the second quarter shooting a 3 and a couple of other baskets and going to the line does help.”
Despite Kaminski’s offensive eruption in the second period, LaBrae continued rolling by outscoring the Huskies by a 20-12 margin to take a 22-point advantage into the half. The Vikings’ offensive onslaught continued thanks to more strong shooting from the perimeter, burying three more 3-point shots to increase the lead to double digits.
Domen acknowledged that the Huskies could have done a better job of defending LaBrae from beyond the arc.
“You need to change defenses and see if it works and try and find a defense that will work,” she noted. “We had to change some things and that is what we did. Obviously LaBrae is a really good shooting team, and they were on and they just hit some shots.”
Although the Vikings only scored six points in the third period, Cardinal could not capitalize and was limited to seven points. Despite outscoring LaBrae by a 16-9 margin in the fourth period, Domen said the game was beyond Cardinal’s reach at that point.
After the team posted a 6-17 record last year in its return from a hiatus after missing the 2022-23 season because there were not enough players to field a team, Domen said that her squad has grown stronger after enduring a 2023-24 campaign filled with trials and tribulations.
She acknowledged that what has made this team special is the camaraderie shared by the players, who have competed together since the junior high level.
“They fight for each other and fight for their team and they have a lot to prove,” she said. “In the eighth grade, they were the Chagrin Valley Conference Champs, they beat Berkshire and they just did not beat Berkshire, they beat Berkshire after losing twice to them in the regular season by two or three points, They are a team that will continue to fight until the very end and they love competition and they love to be the underdog so they can prove everyone else wrong.”
The Huskies are also aided by continuity, as they did not graduate a single senior from last year’s team and added five freshmen to the program this year, giving them enough numbers to have a junior varsity team.
Domen said that the program’s revival has continued trending upward.
“Now that we have that, you can sit there and talk to those girls and say, ‘Hey, watch this person, this is what you need to do,’ so having a junior varsity program is tremendous so we can continue to grow our program to bigger and better things,” she said.
Following a crossover CVC road contest against Harvey on Tuesday night, the Huskies will host CVC rival Orange in another crossover game on Friday evening in Middlefield at 6:45 p.m.
