XENIA — It was already known that the Legacy Christian Academy girls basketball team was pretty good, even before Thursday’s home game with Dayton Christian had started. But with the addition of some previously injured players to a good mix of proven talent, the Knights might be even better now.
LCA (13-1, 7-0 in the Metro Buckeye Conference) rolled to a 60-15 win over Dayton Christian on Jan. 17, the Knights’ 12th straight win. Despite missing more shots than their coach would’ve liked to see, they still made it look easy.
Leading 30-9 at the half, Legacy outscored the Warriors 18-2 in the third period to take command with a 48-11 lead heading into the fourth period of play. Despite a rash of intentional extra passes to a Knights teammate on each fourth-quarter possession, Legacy outscored a short-handed DC bunch, 12-4 the rest of the way.
Dayton Christian coach Kathryn Hill said her team played well, but they just ran up against a very good LCA squad.
“They’re very very athletic, they’ve played a lot of basketball, and they’re very well coached. It doesn’t matter who’s on the floor for them, they move the ball around and they’re aggressive the whole time,” said Hill. “I’m looking forward to watching them in the tournament and I hope they represent our league well, because I think that they will.”
LCA coach Mark Combs had the post-season in mind, especially after grabbing a dominating halftime lead. He played a variety of player combinations against a Dayton Christian team that had eight players at its disposal due to injuries and school commitments.
“Obviously, we have a little bit of an eye toward the tournament, and we know that we still have some important games ahead for us in the regular season, but one of the things we haven’t had very much of this year is depth,” Combs said. “Danielle (Matthews) had been out of the lineup hurt, and so with her back, we’ve been working to get her some playing time. She just needs repetition … She hasn’t played a lot of basketball yet this year, so I made sure to get her in as much as I possibly could.
“And we were able to get 6-8 other people some playing time tonight, and we’ll need that in the post season. The teams that are good in the postseason, they’ve got depth. And so that’s something that we’re working on.”
Emily Riddle led everybody with 21 points scored, Emma Hess scored a dozen points, Matthews scored 11 while Maddy Combs, Kathleen Ahner, Alyssa Free and Margaret Kensinger combined for the team’s other 16 points.
“We didn’t shoot the ball particularly well tonight, but we were able to get the looks that we like to get,” Combs said. “But once you start to see that you’ve got the game in control, you start looking down your bench and you do what you can to get those kids some badly needed minutes.”
Camryn Collinsworth led Dayton Christian with six points, while five other Warriors combined for the team’s other nine points. DC is now 5-8 overall, 2-5 in the MBC, and they’ll play a non-league road game next, a scheduled 12:30 p.m. Saturday Jan. 19 contest at Oakwood.
LCA has a good nonleague challenge ahead on Saturday. They’ll play at Alter (7-7) at 7 p.m. Saturday in Kettering.
