Belleville Girls Open Season With Two Wins

The Belleville girls basketball team opened the season up on November 13th with a 60-44 home win vs the Albany Comets. Coach Greenleaf was overall satisfied with his team’s performance.
“We have a lot of new faces on the roster this season that were playing in their first varsity game. It’s good to get that one out of the way and start to move forward in the season,” Greenleaf said. “Albany is a good team with some really nice players. We couldn’t ever really pull away to a comfortable lead so it was good to see how the new players would respond to that”.
Belleville led 33-21 at half, and never looked back, eventually winning 60-44.
Freshman Ava Foley led the Wildcats with 17 points while senior Rachael Heittola added 14. Rest of the scoring saw junior Sophia Grady with 8, junior Erin Kittleson with 7, sophomore Ashley Hansen with 5, senior Jade Halvensleben and junior Jenna Shrader each chipped in 4 and sophomore Ceci Grefsheim added 1 point.
On Thursday, November 15th, the Wildcats traveled to Orfordville to play the host Vikings. The Belleville squad started the game off slowly and fell behind by 11 points at halftime, 35-24.
“We had a game plan of what we wanted to do and for some reason we weren’t executing that in the first half,” said Greenleaf. “We wanted to be aggressive to the basket and take the ball to the hoop, but for some reason we decided to take the easy route and just shoot from the outside.”
Whatever was relayed at halftime worked. The Wildcats came out and pressed and cut the lead down little by little until a free throw by Jade Halvensleben put them in the lead for good with eight minutes to go.
“When we play the game as we are supposed to, we are a pretty good team. We need to attack the basket and create opportunities for not only the player with the ball, but also their teammates,” said Greenleaf.
Senior Rachael Heittola led Belleville with 27 points, while senior Jade Halvensleben notched 13.
The team plays at Lodi on November 20th, hosts Poynette on November 27th and will play at Wisconsin Dells on December 6th.