Lakeland Girls Basketball Has a Learning Experience

It was a learning experience for Lakeland’s young squad, which has only four returning players from last season, when it hosted unbeaten Rye on Dec. 17.

Visiting Rye (4-0) showed why it is one of the contenders to win the Section 1 Class AA title when it defeated Lakeland 50-11.

It was the second unbeaten team Lakeland has played in this young season, as it also played at Class A championship contender Ardsley (4-0) on Dec. 11, falling to the Panthers 60-47. 

“We have a lot of tough teams on the schedule and there is nothing we can do about it, we can’t complain about it,” Mike Auerbach, Lakeland coach, said. “We are going to have to either grow quickly from it or otherwise keep struggling. That’s part of it. You want to play against the better teams to figure out where our shortcomings are and how we improve, to stay in some of these games. We did a nice job last week against Ardsley. It was a better game offensively for us, we were knocking down some shots against a team that was just as good as Rye. We’ll figure out where we have to go from here.”

Lakeland hung tough early against the Garnets, thanks to two free throws from Riley Waters (four points) and a driving layup from Liliana Aguirre (four points). The latter came with 3:17 to go in the first quarter, cutting Rye’s lead to 7-4.

“Our energy was good early,” Auerbach said. “We were OK for most of the game defensively. We did a good job early on defensively, we just were never able to find any offense. I thought for the most part, until the game got out of hand, we did a decent job creating good shots. We are just really struggling right now to put the ball in the basket.”

In the second quarter, Aguirre finished a nice fast break that halted a Rye 10-0 run, slicing the Garnet advantage to 22-8 with three minutes to go before halftime. 

“We did an OK job against their press, spreading them out,” Auerbach said. “Then once we figured out how we wanted to spread them out and attack, we were able to create some opportunities in transition, we just never converted nearly enough of them.”

To Lakeland’s credit, it did create good three point opportunities as well, but weren’t able to cash in on them.

“I told the girls at halftime that when our decision-making was good, we were beating their press, we were finding the open player, we were getting some layups, we were getting some open threes in transition, same thing in the halfcourt, then our decision-making falls apart a little bit,” Auerbach said. “We are a young team, with young guards, and that’s part of the process. We have to go to school on ourselves a little bit here, watch some film and figure out what’s working for us and why it falls apart on us but we’ll learn from it.”

Allie Waters (two points) and Sarah Devane (one point) also scored for Lakeland (1-4).