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Harris scores 36 points as Irish rout Cardinals
By Greg Gulas
YOUNGSTOWN
Ursuline’s Dayshanette Harris, Anyah Curd and Lindsay Bell had the Cardinal Mooney girls basketball team seeing double on Thursday night.
Harris nearly had her crosstown rivals seeing triple.
All three Fighting Irish players registered double-doubles as Harris scored 36 points and dished out 11 assists, Curd added 15 points and 10 rebounds and Bell scored 14 points and grabbed 11 rebounds to lead Ursuline to a 76-54 victory over visiting arch-rival Cardinal Mooney.
Harris also had eight rebounds to fall just short of a triple-double.
“It’s very important to get my teammates involved in the game. We cannot win unless we play team basketball and tonight was a good example of what can happen when everyone works together,” Harris said. “We came in with the mindset that they weren’t going to play easy on us. We knew that from our last game, so we wanted to assert ourselves right from the opening tip.”
Assert themselves the Fighting Irish (10-8) did as they scored the first 15 points of the game and behind Harris’ 10 points and seven more form Curd, opened a 20-7 advantage.
Bell’s 10 points and nine more from Harris in the second quarter helped Ursuline extend its lead to 41-15 by halftime.
“We were tentative the first time that we played so tonight our goal was to jump on them and make sure that we continued to play as a team,” Curd said. “We kept feeding the ball to the player who had the hot hand. It’s a good feeling when you win the season series from your arch-rivals.”
The one Cardinals’ player that proved to be just as hot as Harris was Camden Hergenrother, who led Cardinal Mooney with 22 points and made six of her eight 3-point attempts.
A lack of execution at both ends of the court proved costly for the Cardinals as their modest two-game win streak came to a halt.
“We failed to execute both offensively and defensively. At times, we got caught watching a great player in Harris,” Cardinal Mooney head coach Jason Baker said. “We put up very little resistance and that was disappointing. When you let a good player like her get free, especially early in the game, you see the damage that she can do.
“With six triples tonight, Camden played really well but she has been doing that for us all season. She’s been our go-to player.”
Nine points by Hergenrother in the third quarter, all from behind the arc, helped Cardinal Mooney (10-8) cut the deficit to 54-32 heading to the final quarter.
Harris’ 12 points in the final period then secured Ursuline’s fourth straight victory as the Fighting Irish moved to 6-1 at home.
“The last couple weeks we’ve played good team ball. We’re very athletic, challenge our players in practice and they’ve responded,” said Ursuline head coach Vanessa Dickson. “We like to force the tempo and have teams play to our style. We like our home court so when we play here, we use it to our advantage.”
Dickson said that in addition to Harris’ shooting prowess, she makes sure that everyone around her gets involved.
“The one thing I have noticed about Dayshanette over the past month is the great team ball that she has played,” Dickson said. “She has become a dynamic point guard, yet is able score when we need her to score. With 11 assists tonight, you see that team mentality and that doesn’t include the misses.”