Girls Basketball: WW South’s Meghan Waldron too much for West Aurora

Updated: December 1, 2011 9:32PM

Whatever illusions the improved West Aurora girls basketball team had of stealing a DuPage Valley Conference win Thursday night at defending champion Wheaton-Warrenville South’s gym quickly went out the window with Tigers’ guard Meghan Waldron’s hot start.

Waldron filled up the stat sheet in leading the undefeated Tigers to a 63-41 win, scoring 16 points, grabbing 10 rebounds, dishing out nine assists and collecting four steals to open the conference slate.

“With this team we’re so selfless,” said Tigers forward Kasey Gassensmith, who scored a game-high 21 points. “We get the ball up there and score easily. We’re a fast team. We like to fastbreak. It’s nice having Meghan at point guard to bring the ball up.”

Waldron scored six points and added five assists in a 19-6 first quarter for WW South (6-0, 1-0), which also held West Aurora (3-4, 0-1) to six points in the third quarter and limited Blackhawks guard Alexis Nelson to just two points on 1-for-11 shooting.

“She’s able to get everybody involved,” Tigers coach Rob Kroehnke said about Waldron. “She likes to get everybody involved. I went in at halftime and didn’t know what to tell them. We were doing everything we needed to do offensively. We went through a little tired stretch in the second quarter defensively, but had a good response in the third quarter. I think it took them over five minutes to score.”

Sophomore forward Liz Skaggs scored 14 points with six rebounds for the Blackhawks, but they were also outrebounded 36-18, which only fueled the Tigers’ fastbreak.

“We didn’t rebound well at all and we knew what they were going to do,” West coach Connie Siljendahl said. “They’re just an awesome team. They probably shot 90 percent, but we just couldn’t rebound. We couldn’t get ourselves in position and they were off and running. There wasn’t much we could do after that.”

Maggie Dansdill scored 10 for the Tigers, and Alexis Wiggins came off the bench to score nine for the Blackhawks.

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