Full story on Highland women

Here's the full story on Highland women's win vs. Kennedy-King by Jeremy Anders

Freeport girls coming up in less than three hours

Freeport (14 - 2, 6 - 0 NIC-10) will host Belvidere North (5 - 11, 4-5) in less than an hour.

Let's see how the Pretzels respond to the Ryan Pierce's challenge for the team to box out more effectively.

Courtney Shiffer and Kelsey Hoefer, while likely won't make history tonight, are inching closer and closer to that 1,000-point mark.

Pray that I'm not the last to know about it again, though.

Highland women wins, 64-59

For more info on the game, visit The Journal-Standard Web site tonight for the full game story.

Ladies night

Freeport's girls basketball team will square off against Belvidere North tonight at, roughly, 7:15 p.m.

Hope there's no quintuple overtime jv game before the varsity shows up. The Pretzels should make short work of the Blue Thunder ... the only sound that has a hue.

Highland womens basketball has a big matchup at 1 p.m. against Kennedy-King. It's a big regional contest and could be a potential Region IV championship preview. The Cougars have taken a two-year hiatus from that championship, falling short in the last two title games.

Speaking of which, Highland will play Sauk Valley Tuesday at 5 p.m. Sauk Valley, if you recall, beat the Cougars for championship in a heartbreaking 55-50 loss.

One of the greatest JV games of all-time

LOL, that's the hook, anyway.

Seriously, the Dakota/Pecatonica fresh/soph game last night, that went to FIVE overtimes, turned out to be pretty exciting — all things considered.

There'll be a notebook soon on the game that created more of a buzz than the varsity game (sorry guys).

Five things Freeport girls can improve to return to Normal (a reporter's point-of-view)

1. Rebounding
To this point, Freeport has done a decent job of rebounding. But it can do better, especially against some of the smaller teams its faced recently.

I was shocked when I saw Montini outrebound the Pretzels on Freeport's home court and that contributed to why Richwoods won in Sterling by nearly 20 points (I wasn't privy to see said game).

Richwoods won the battle of the boards, 38-25.

Freeport coach Ryan Pierce might have said it best: "Things come too easily for them sometimes." If the Pretzels box out, they'll be that much tougher to defeat

2. Patience on offense
I'm not sure what it is, but sometimes the Pretzels appear to be rushing shots. At other times, the offense just doesn't look as crisp as it has been in the past.

3. Free-throw shooting
I'm knit-picking here but I'm pretty sure everyone won't mind Freeport shooting 100 percent from the charity stripe, right?

4. Defensive help
It's rare, but it does happen. For the most part, Freeport is about as defensively-sound as any team in the area. I'm going to sound a bit like Pierce here, but, they're not a team that forces a lot of turnovers but will stay in front throughout.

But when there's a lapse, there's been some layups given up. Most teams find it hard it difficult to find said layups though.

5. Better competition
Is Freeport slipping?

In a word: no.

The Pretzels could very well finish the season with one of the best records in program history, because I don't see them losing another game unless Monroe plays a heck of a game.

They'll finish undefeated in conference play for the second straight year, no matter how much any other team in the NIC-10 pretends it can do otherwise.

By the end of the year, it's likely Freeport will bolster four players each with more than 1,000 points.

To this point, the Pretzels have only eight in school history. Besides Marshall, maybe, the only two teams in the state in Class 3A capable of defeating Freeport are the two that have beaten them this season.