The Western Brown Lady Broncos hit the road to open the regular season against a former conference foe when the team travelled north to take on the Clinton-Massie Lady Falcons.

The squad had major trouble defending senior Miguela Santoro, who hit seven field goals and five free-throws en route to 20 total points in the game. She also tallied 11 steals for the Falcons, who led 24-7 at halftime.

Head coach Dennis Overstake did not mince words, noting his team just could not defend the Falcons’ point guard.

“We just didn’t have an answer for her,” Overstake said. “She’s a four-year starter at the point and a very good shooter.”

Mackenzie Brooks led the Broncos offensively, scoring six points and hauling in nine rebounds. Four Lady Broncos scored four points and seven total players added at least one.

The team was balanced on offense, but according to Overstake, the balance wasn’t enough to overcome the deficit they faced.

“I thought we had progressed pretty well through scrimmages,” Overstake said. “When we got to our last scrimmages, we had teams with the same caliber of Clinton Massie. We had to use several defenses to stop Santoro. We had several people score, we just didn’t have enough score high enough to close that gap down and try to get a win.”

The Lady Broncos still have plenty of time to get things corrected, as this was just the team’s first game of the season. Overstake realizes this, and has identified a few things the team needs to work on.

“We still have both sides of the ball to make adjustments and corrections on,” Overstake said. “We need to keep learning this week before our next ball game. Defensively, we had practiced working on the different defense, so we have to be able to tighten our defense a little bit to try and control at least one main scorer. Our shooting, we’ve got to pick up our shooting so we’re more efficient. Normally if you can keep a girls varsity team to 39-40 points, you’ve got an excellent chance at winning a ball game. We just need to be able to score more points and that means we have to execute our offense and get more opportunities to score.”

A quick glance at the roster would appear to show the Broncos as a veteran team when that is in fact not the case, according to Overstake.

“Even though we have several seniors on the team, five of them didn’t play last year,” Overstake said. “A lack of experience at the upper level is something they have to keep working on. They work hard at practice every night and they’re trying to take in the new system. Hopefully, it moves faster than I hope it will because when we get to December we’re playing 2 nights a week. We have some players capable of playing well for us, we just have to put them in the right spots for them to use their ability.”

The Lady Broncos return to the court in their first home match of the season Monday, November 30 against Goshen.

By Garth Shanklin

gshanklin@civitasmedia.com

Reach Garth Shanklin at 937-378-6161 or follow him on Twitter @GNDShanklin.