Lady Hodags dominate Wausau East

The Rhinelander High School girls’ basketball team rolled over Wausau East in non-conference action Tuesday night. Vivian Lamers scored 20 points, Dawsyn Barkus chipped in 11 and the Hodags cruised past the Lumberjacks 53-17 in Wausau.

Wausau East (0-17, 0-6 Wisconsin Valley) actually scored the first two buckets of the game, but didn’t record a field goal the remainder of the first half. Rhinelander (13-10, 7-4 Great Northern) closed on a 30-1 run to take a 30-5 lead to the break and continued to roll in the second half. 

“We had a kind of talk about there wasn’t a huge atmosphere. Early game, not a lot of fans, so we had just to bring the energy ourselves. I thought the girls did a pretty good job with that,” Hodag coach Ryan Clark said. “We were a little sloppy and we didn’t recognize they were in a zone to start. From there, we got some baskets, Viv hit a 3 and then we went to our full court man just to kind of get us going a little bit.”

Lexi Beran put the Hodags in front on a driving layup with 12:56 remaining in the first half and the Hodags kept the pedal down. Rhinelander led 14-4 with 10:48 left in the half and extended that to 18-4 on a four-point play by Lamers with 7:32 before the break. Wausau East finally broke Rhinelander’s 22-point unanswered streak on a free throw by Elizabeth Dennis with 5:28 left in the half, but the Hodags further pulled away from there. 

Clark said the Hodags tried to pressure sparingly against an overmatched Wausau East squad, but needed to do so a bit in the first half to establish tempo.

“We didn’t want to press them too much because we knew that they would struggle against our pressure, but that was more just an energy thing to get us kind of like getting up and down and working up a sweat. I thought we did a pretty good job,” he said.

Kelsey Winter added seven points in the win for Rhinelander, which clinched a winning record on the season with the victory.

“I thought we had some really nice passes and transition,” Clark said. “Viv knocked down three 3s. I thought she didn’t play down to the competition. I thought she gave us really good energy from the entire time she was out there, so she had a nice clean basketball game. 

“Dawsyn hit a 3 and had some nice little plays. Kelsey was playing really, really hard. I told the girls afterwards, you know, one of the most important things was we came out of this game uninjured. We’re healthy, we’re getting healthier, no one got dinged up or anything.” 

Liliana Hoenisch, Evelyn Thome and Jerzey Moen each scored four to lead Wausau East. 

Clark said the Hodags hoped to extend their bench a bit further than it did on Tuesday, but had a number of players working back from injury or illness, limiting their minutes. 

Rhinelander has a tough contest to close out the regular season at Mosinee, which comes in fresh off a 57-50 upset of No. 7 (D2) Rice Lake on Monday night. From there, the Hodags will have a week before their WIAA tournament opener at Menomonie Feb. 28. 

Jeremy Mayo may be reached at [email protected].