Fox gets 25 as Lincoln steamrolls Casey 63-35

By Mike Marseemarsee@amnews.comLIBERTY — When you’re hot, you’re hot. And Emily Fox and her teammates couldn’t have been much hotter Friday night.Fox scored 25 points and led a remarkable shooting effort by Lincoln County as it wrapped up the regular season with a 65-35 cakewalk over Casey County.Fox went 6-for-7 from 3-point range and the Lady Patriots shot 65 percent from the field in an atypical game between two teams that have staged some classic battles in recent years.“When we’re shooting, we just have a good game,” Fox said. “And most of it came from sharing the ball. We got the ball to open people, and we knocked them down.”Visiting Lincoln (19-9) hit 11 of its 15 shots in the first half and 22 of 34 overall, knocking down shots from outside and scoring in transition to roll into the postseason on a high note.“I¿think they came in focused,” Lincoln coach Cassandra McWhorter said. “It’s the last regular-season game, it’s on the road, it’s right before tournament time. We’ve been having really focused practices and just trying to work on the little things and executing, and I¿just think they were really focused in tonight.”Without its leading scorer and without its shooting touch, Casey (15-14) couldn’t keep up. The Lady Rebels went 4-for-18 in the first half and 9-for-36 overall to finish at 25 percent as they lost their fifth straight game and fell to 2-8 since center Megan Pittman suffered a season-ending knee injury.It was an unusually one-sided game between two teams that have made a habit of playing close games, and Pittman’s absence surely had a great deal to do with that.Lincoln has won four of its last five games against Casey, but Fox said the Lady Patriots had not forgotten a 59-53 loss to Casey in the first round of last year’s 12th Region Tournament.“We were really focused because we remembered the game from last year,” Fox said. “And it’s Casey County. It’s a big game.”That’s usually true. Lincoln and Casey have played regular-season and postseason games only a couple of weeks apart in each of the previous four years, and seven of those eight games were decided by 11 points or less. In the teams’ 29 meetings since the 1998-99 season, the Lady Rebels have won 15 games and the Lady Patriots have won 14, and 23 games have been decided by 10 points or less.But this game went Lincoln’s way right away. The Lady Patriots trailed for only 23 seconds in the early going, and they began building their lead midway through the first quarter.They broke the game open in the second quarter with a 15-2 run that included two 3-pointers and nine points by Fox — she hit her first four shots from long range — and all four of Kourtney Belcher’s points, taking a 30-14 lead with 1:50 remaining before halftime.Lincoln then left Casey far behind in the third quarter, this time outscoring the Lady Rebels 19-1 over a 4-minute span to go up 53-19. Fox hit two more 3s and scored eight points, Tiandra Hocker added five points and Harris had four during that run.Lincoln also dominated the boards, outrebounding Casey 37-15. “That’s huge. Casey County (is) patient in their offense ... and I thought we did a good job of giving them only one chance. We limited their offensive rebounds, and that helps you get into an offensive flow,” McWhorter said.Belcher and Harris had seven rebounds each for Lincoln, and Spencer Sims had five.Rachel Spangler had eight of the Lady Patriots’ 19 assists, and Fox had five.Fox, who was 9-for-12 from the field and came within two 3-pointers of the school single-game record shared by McWhorter and 2010 graduate Nikki Bustle, said the Lady Patriots were in a good place as they headed back to their place for the postseason. They played Boyle County on Wednesday night in a 45th District Tournament semifinal — the championship game is Friday — and they will also host the 12th Region Tournament next week.“I think right now we have the mindset of being a winning team. If we come out focused like that, we can do good things,” she said.Lincoln was not without its flaws, however. The Lady Patriots committed 25 turnovers and shot worse at the free-throw line, where they were 14-for-27, than they did from the field. McWhorter said while the Lady Patriots need to improve in those areas, they didn’t look so bad in light of their torrid shooting.“When you come out and hit shots, it makes the turnovers seem not so bad,”¿she said.McWhorter said she was also pleased with Lincoln’s defense, which she charged with curbing Casey’s dribble penetration.“I told my girls to make them beat us from the outside,” she said.Casey was just 3-for-18 from 3-point range.Casey honored Pittman, who suffered a torn knee ligament for the second time in 18 months, by allowing her to start the game and participate in a ceremonial tipoff — to which McWhorter had agreed — before coach Randy Salyers took her out of the game to a standing ovation and presented her with the ball used for the tipoff, which had been signed by the other Casey players.