story by Christina Elias, photos by Jessie Culver

The St. Teresa’s basketball team lost to Benton High School 59-36 in their first game of the season Nov. 25.

According to assistant coach Robert Tonnies, the team knew that facing Benton, a Class 4 team and last year’s state champions, was going to be a difficult game.

“We knew that the way that we battle in this game will define in a lot of ways who we are going forward in the season, [because] we knew it was going to be a tough team,” Tonnies said. “The way we face that adversity defines our character as a team, so that’s what we were going for going in—building character.”

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Junior Eleanor Lueke led the team with the most points, scoring 21 total. According to Lueke, head coach Megan Nyquist told the team at the beginning of the game “to attack the basket and get to the rim.”

“I think that we started off a ton better this year than we did last year,” Lueke said. “I think that we started on a good, high note even though we lost, but I think that it’s going to be pretty good from here on out.”

Nyquist agreed, stating that the team as a whole “had some [minor setbacks] happen last year that didn’t really let us get rolling as a team. So this is kind of the start to what we want our season to be and what we want our program to be.”

Due to changes in game rules, there was an increased number of team and personal fouls. According to Tonnies, the team needs “to work on moving our feet and staying off them with our hands” coming out of their first game.

“If you’re guarding anybody who has the ball, there’s a no-contact rule while they’re dribbling, so you used to be able to put a hand on them or an arm on them, or if they’re running alongside you, put a body on them, [but] now all of that contact is a foul,” Tonnies said. “By the end of the game . . . our whole bench had fouled out, we had four on the bench with 20 fouls, and the girls that were in had 18 fouls. So there were 38 fouls total. We pretty much shot free throws the whole game.”

The JV basketball team played before the varsity team and won 31-16 against Benton.