CAPE ELIZABETH — Freshman Anna DeWolfe scored 24 points Friday night to lead Greely to a season-opening 45-24 victory against Cape Elizabeth in a Western Maine Conference girls’ basketball game.
“We were awful,” Greely Coach Joel Rogers said. “I don’t know what it is but in my four years here we haven’t played well offensively in this gym. We don’t shoot well.”
Rogers said a lot of the shooting woes was due to the Capers’ defense.
“They challenged our shots,” he said. “That’s as bad as we’ve ever shot in a long, long time.”
The Capers kept within five points until the final minutes of the third quarter, when the Rangers, who won the Class B state title last season, got their fast break going.
“There were too many turnovers on our part,” Cape Elizabeth Coach Chris Casterella said. “They can run the floor and heave the ball the length of the floor, and they have kids who can finish.”
The Rangers, who beat the Capers 53-28 in last season’s regional final, reeled off a 9-0 run in the final 1:35 of the third quarter for a 30-16 lead.
“If we hadn’t given up the transition baskets it would have been a closer game,” Casterella said, “but we couldn’t do our piece at the offensive end.”
DeWolfe, who sank four of Greely’s six 3-pointers, had 17 points in the second half, when Isabel Porter scored nine of her 10 points.
Maddie Bowe led Cape with 13 points.
The Rangers are expected to rely heavily on 3-point shooting this season, and Rogers wasn’t happy with his team’s performance from beyond the arc.
“In two preseason scrimmages we had 17 3s in one game and 15 in another, but this was the real deal,” he said. “We’ve got to be patient and run our offense, and we didn’t do that tonight.”
The fast break produced eight of Greely’s 18 baskets.
“We can get out and run and we finished pretty well,” Rogers said, “(but) we were just atrocious from the 3-point line.”
“We gave up too many shots around the basket, easy transition baskets for them,” Casterella said.
The Rangers took a 10-3 lead in the first quarter when the Capers hit just one of their 12 shots and committed 11 turnovers.
“We couldn’t generate anything offensively,” Casterella said. “We were shooting from the outside. We weren’t looking to attack the seams and get to the basket. It was one and done on our part.”
Cape managed to pull with 15-12 midway through the second quarter, but could get no closer despite holding a 27-12 rebounding edge during the second and third quarters.
The Capers committed 30 turnovers.
“We’ve got three freshmen playing major minutes so this is going to happen.” Casterella said.
“The majority of my players don’t have varsity experience. We have to get acclimated so you kind of have to take your lumps.”
The Capers were without senior point guard Montana Braxton, who hasn’t been gven the go-ahead to play after suffering a concussion while playing soccer.
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