PENNSYLVANIA Mercer cruises against Slippery Rock

The Mustangs jumped out to an early lead and rolled to a 41-24 win.
By BILL ALBRIGHT
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
MERCER, Pa. -- The Mercer High girls basketball team, running a disciplined offense while taking advantage of numerous Slippery Rock turnovers, raced out to a 17-3 lead and cruised to a 41-24 win over the Rockets Thursday.
Although happy with the win, Mercer coach Gary Sansom was quick to point out that his team needs to learn how to play a complete game.
"We got the big lead, then we just quit playing," Sansom said. "We talked about it before the game that they need to put together two or three good quarters instead of one or one-and-a-half."
Lacked intensity: While watching his team fall behind from the outset, Slippery Rock coach John Tabisz felt the Rockets simply lacked intensity on both ends of the floor.
"We just didn't seem to have any intensity and we were a step slow in everything we did," said Tabisz. "We don't score well enough to come back from 20 down."
While the Mustangs (3-3) were steadily building up their early lead, Slippery Rock (0-5) was victimized by Murphy's Law.
Everything that could have gone wrong seemed to go that way as they committed numerous turnovers, missed a lot of shots and even had the ball become lodged between the backboard and the rim on an errant free throw attempt.
"If you coach long enough, you are going to get a couple of these games where nothing goes right," said Tabisz.
"When that happens, you just have to back up from there and work on your mistakes."
With Slippery Rock cutting its deficit to a dozen less than three minutes into the final period, Sansom felt it was time for his club to get back to work on offense, and they responded to his challenge.
"We just didn't have anything going for us in the first part of the second half," said Sansom.
"Then in the fourth quarter, they started to come back at us. I called a timeout and told the girls we needed a basket.
"These kids are just starting to see the type of intensity you need game in and game out, and right now, we don't have that."
Learning experience: Despite coming out on the short end of the game, Tabisz feels that his club can take something away from it to try and get better.
"We just have to continue to work hard to cut our turnovers down; we need to pass the ball much better than we did tonight and we need to knock some shots down," said Tabisz.
Leading the Mustangs were a pair of double-digit scorers as Autumn Whenry totaled 14 and Shelah Bolyard had 12.
For Slippery Rock, Megan Finch scored eight points.