With a full-court press in the first half helping create 34 Wabasso turnovers, the Tigers rolled to a 64-37 win over the Rabbits in a Tomahawk Division girls basketball game Monday night.

The Tigers shot 27 of 68 (39.7%) from the floor and committed 18 turnovers.

They were led by Jada Reese’s 17 points, while posts Olivia Milbrath and Kendall Krueger had 16 points and 10 points, respectively.

“We played very sloppy offensively, but if very sloppy is still 64 points, I’ll be OK with that,” Tigers head coach Decker Scheffler said. “But we definitely need to clean up our offense a little bit and just our aggressiveness overall. We give our posts a lot of post touches and right now we’re still a little bit hesitant, we’re kicking out, we’re not trying to score off of those, so we’re trying to get them to be more aggressive on that, all of them. But we really harp on defensive rebounding and I told them at halftime that [the Rabbits] were stuck at 5 points for quite some time, so were impressed with the defensive intensity overall, but offensively we need to clean it up, for sure.”

Staff photo by Travis Rosenau Springfield’s Kendall Krueger goes up for a shot in the paint during a Tomahawk Division girls basketball game against Wabasso Monday night at Springfield High School.

The Rabbits shot 12 of 55 (21.8%) from the floor. Many of their turnovers came in the first half when the Tigers applied a press to create an early conundrum offensively for the Rabbits.

Rabbits head coach Paige Richert said after the team’s tough 2024-25 season where they finished 1-26, she expects teams to come out aggressively on defense and try to create turnovers with the press.

“Teams will always try to bully us,” Richert said. “We weren’t the best of the best last year, so they’re going to bully us all throughout until we can be confident and easily break it and when we do that, nobody’s going to bully us.”

The Rabbits were led by Ava Samyn and Cassie Bliss, who each had 8 points and eight rebounds. Bliss added three steals, while Elizabeth Morin had 6 points, Kayleigha Johnson and Audrey Johnson each had 5 points and Sara Carlson had three assists and three steals. Kenley Guetter got into some foul trouble with three in the game but finished with nine rebounds.

Reese not only led the team in scoring, she also helped coach Scheffler’s plan of getting the her post players more involved and better looks in the second half. That came as a result of her increased confidence in her scoring and shooting.

Staff photo by Travis Rosenau Wabasso’s Kenley Guetter puts up a shot while guarded by Springfield’s Ayla Rothmeier during the first half of Monday’s Tomahawk Division girls basketball game at Springfield High School.

“I finally got some shots to fall,” Reese said. “My drives weren’t always falling, they weren’t falling at the beginning, but then throughout the game, more and more just kept going in, I was getting good passes off to my bigs and the people around me and just kept on going. It was good.”

After buckets from Milbrath and Reese had the Tigers on the board first, Samyn dropped in the first point for Wabasso on a free throw. As the Tigers began creating turnovers with their full-court press, it led to an 8-0 run and 12-1 lead before a 3 by Samyn ended it and made it a 12-4 game.

The Tigers slowly added to their lead, going up 22-5 on a free throw from Ayla Rothmeier to cap off a 10-0 run. After free throws by Samyn with 1:13 left in the opening half, Reese scored on a layup and added two free throws to give the Tigers a 33-14 halftime lead.

The Rabbits kept the deficit around 20 points for much of the second half until a jumper by Makay Winkelmann had the Tigers up 49-24. Bliss answered with a layup and a free throw by Carlson had the Rabbits down 49-27.

A corner 3 by Reese moments later again had the Tigers up 25, 56-31, and the Tigers took their largest lead of the night with the final basket of the game, a bucket in the paint by Molly Jacobs.

Despite the turnover issues, Richert was happy with how her team’s defense responded, especially in the second half.

“Our defense was a lot better than the first two games even, so that was our big focus tonight was playing lockdown defense and the offense will come,” Richert said. “We stayed out of running time and we couldn’t say that a whole lot last year, so it’s a small, little victory for us.”

Springfield (2-0, 2-1) hosts New Ulm Cathedral in Tomahawk action on Dec. 2, while Wabasso (0-3, 0-1) is at Tracy-Milroy-Balaton for a Tuesday night game in Tracy.