L-W East Girls Basketball Refuses to Take Foot Off the Gas

When you're up by nearly 20 points for an entire basketball game, keeping a killer instinct and playing defense can be tough to focus on.

However, for the Lincoln-Way East girls basketball team, that task comes naturally to the senior-led squad. East topped sister school Lincoln-Way West 57-29 Tuesday in Day 2 action of the Medieval Classic and coach Jim Martin said it was all do to his dynamic senior players.

“They're hard, they want to play,” Martin said. “With a kid like Taylor (Johnson), she plays hard every minute, every second. I don't have to tell her to play hard, she goes non-stop. When she plays and Caitlin (McMahon) plays—she runs so well up and down—they set the tone for us.”

That tone, an up-tempo, hustling style proved too much for Lincoln-Way West against the Griffins. East jumped all over the Warriors early, taking a 20-4 lead in the second quarter before stretching its margin to 32-7 at the half.

The Warriors came out in the second half and made a valiant effort to claw their way back into the game, but East's lead proved to be too much. West coach Ryan White said that his team might have let the pregame matchup get to his players, but that in the second half, he was glad to see his players play with abandon.

“They just relaxed a little bit more,” he said. “In the second half, they did go out there like they had nothing to lose. The game was, for the most part, over. So they just had to go out there and play for the West name on their jersey and they did that.”

Both teams will play on Day 3 of the Medieval Classic, West against Plainfield South at 3 p.m., while the Griffins will take on Joliet Catholic Academy at 6 p.m. Both games will be at Lincoln-Way East.