The Lady Vikings went to work on Friday against the Shoreline team and won 40-29, and triumphed as well on Saturday, on Orcas home ground against Mt. Vernon Christian 45-39 in overtime

Coach Terry Moran-Hodge said, “We had a great week of practice, and the young women applied everything they had worked on during the week and on Friday and Saturday they played with great intensity. We’ve had some tough games down there and it was good to take a win home from that gym. We’re going through our league games twice, home and away, and right now we have two wins and four losses against our opponents. We’ve played all the teams and have made adjustments on what we’ve observed and we’ve corrected what went wrong last time. Agaist Shoreline for example, defensively, we had to keep their top scorer at bay. Stephanie Shaw took her on and covered her defensively like she was her own jersey. Shaw was tireless and would not let up. They followed through and got ahead early in the game and they kept it up.”

Laney Padbury had 15 points for the game against Shoreline, and had a couple of three pointers early in the first quarter as well as a series of lay ins. Anika Thomas had ten points and played tough defense that day as well.

“Definitely we our shooting percentage was low against Shoreline, but we made up for it with rebounds,” said Coach Moran-Hodge. “Halley Parnell, for example, had ten rebounds against Shoreline and played tough defense, and Anika Thomas had eight rebounds.”

“On Saturday, I admit that I was worried because the last time we played back to back games, they were worn out! But we ended up beating Mt. Vernon 45-39. We had almost a ten-point lead throughout the entire four quarters. Our defense set the tone, and defensively played really strongly, forcing turnovers and steals. As a team we shot 50 percent as opposed to 27 percent on Friday, so we improved our consistency at scoring very quickly. We were also taking the ball and making lay ins rather than taking outside shots. Shaw had 14 points for the game – she just had a great game – Padbury had eight points, and Parnell had a great game as well on Saturday. She scored 11 points, had five steals, and nine rebounds. Also significant statistically was that Sydney Harris had seven assists and led the team in finding the open person to get to the basket. As a whole our team had 15 assists and 20 baskets, so percentage-wise that’s very good from a consistency standpoint. We only scored 26 points on them the last time, so this was an improvement. We need to rest up for the three games coming up. There’s currently a four-way tie for second place in our league, but these two games gave us a lot of confidence to push for that spot.”

The Lady Vikings played Tuesday against the Friday Harbor Lady Wolverines.