Horizon tops Ione, lose at Prairie City on the road

At Prairie City on Dec. 14, “we played poorly, mostly on the offensive side,” coach Darrin Lingel said. The team shot 33 percent from the field; Alex Petshow led the Hawks with 24 points on seven-for-16 shooting, with Derek Johnston scoring 11, Caleb Lingel 9 and Kai Robertson 5.

“We need to do a better job of making adjustments offensively,” Lingel said. “If we had made the adjustments, we’d have been okay. I felt we played with them the whole.

“We need to move the ball better. We need to make the other team’s defense work. When we’re playing a good team, we need to be confident in our abilities to move the ball,” Lingel said.

Against Ione, Johnston led with 18, Bailey Holste and Lingel hit 13, while Petshow added six and Skyler Leeson four.

“At this point, six games in, we have to be a more consistent team offensively and defensively,” Lingel said. “If we can clean that up and be more consistent, we can be a good team; but right now, we’re up and down.”

The team faces much stronger teams, and on the road, Dec. 18 at Condon-Wheeler, its first Big Sky Conference game, and Dec. 21 at Joseph.

“We want to take care of league contests,” Lingel said. “Condon is a better skilled team than Ione, but we hope to play well,” Lingel said. Joseph is a slight unknown, and the trip is the longest the Hawks will make this regular season.

Coming off the Prairie City trip, this is the first time in years the squad had made two long-distance trips.

“We wanted to play really good teams in our pre-season, and to do that we had to go wherever we wanted to play to get those games,” Lingel said.

Against Ione, “We did what we were supposed to do,” he said.

“You don’t gain a lot in playing a young and inferior skilled team,” Lingel said. “The benefit is we got a lot of bench players in and they got varsity playing time.”