ATLANTA, Ga. - The Eastside Lady Eagles (12-5, 6-4 region 4-AAAA) have little to be happy about in their 63-40 loss to the North Clayton Lady Eagles (10-7, 6-4 region 4-AAAA) in a game where Eastside struggled in multiple facets of the game.
The Eastside squad hanged tight with the North Clayton squad in the first quarter, but the second quarter proved to be the one that sunk the visiting Eastside team's proverbial ship.
North Clayton outscored the Eastside Lady Eagles 17-4 in that quarter, and they would continue to lead by double-digits for the remainder of the game until they secured their 23-point victory.
Eastside head coach Gladys King was perturbed at her team's performance, and it was clear that she felt a level of disappointment in her team's showing in this road region game.
"I don't think we brought our A-game tonight," King said, "I feel like we just came and showed up. We got off the bus and just showed up."
King did haver some praise to dish around to some of her players and especially highlighted the play of T'Niah Douglas and Sydney Duren, despite their play not showing up in the scorer's column much.
"She (Douglas) still was able to step up and handle the ball. I had to move her to the one position because she did a really good job of handling the pressure and aggressiveness of the ball," King said.
"She (Douglas) still kept fighting and kept trying. I went with Sydney Duren coming off the bench. I thought she bumped around there and did what she needed to do coming off the bench."
Alysee Dobbs led the way for the Eagles in scoring with 14 points, and Lizzie Teasley had a solid night as well as she finished with 13 points. However, King said, "she wasn't going to talk about leading scorers," because she felt like a loss like this really means they did not have any leading scorers since it's a team game.
As a team, the shooting was dismal as the Eastside squad shot around 20% from the field. With such poor shooting and North Clayton finding easy baskets, King was disappointed in her girls' missing assignments.
"Well, we weren't getting to our assignments. We work on transition all the time," King said, "There was a lot of missed assignments, a lot of people not hustling back on defense, not boxing out and rebounding, not getting position on the girl on the block, number 12 looked like a world-beater tonight, and we didn't stop that."
The Eastside Lady Eagles will need to get back to playing their style of basketball and will stay on the road with hopes of doing just that against the Salem Lady Seminoles (2-17, 1-6 region 4-AAAA) on Saturday, Jan. 18.
