“Defensively, that’s been our goal all year is to try to get starting out fast and get out creating opportunities for us to score,” Cedar Mountain head coach Brook Christensen said. “Those are the things we continue to work on and continue to get better on. Playing hard on [Taylor] Berkner, Berkner’s been scoring well these first five or six games for them, so that was one of our goals was to shut her down too. I thought we did well with all that.”

Cedar Mountain held Berkner to 8 points after she had been averaging 18.6 coming into the game.

That defense especially stood strong in the first few minutes of the game as the Cougars capitalized on several turnovers during their initial run.

“We think that defense is key,” Cedar Mountain’s Aubrey Steffl said. “Always from my AAU career, one coach told me that defense leads to offense. Once you worry about defense, you’ll get to offense. That’s really been a big role, we work on defense all the time. We find a player that is scoring a lot, shut her down and all the rest of us do our job. That’s a big key to doing it. Even me, Brook’s always like, ‘Get them going,’ so I’m like, ‘OK, I’ve got to start talking,’ then everybody follows.”

Staff photo by Ari Selvey Sleepy Eye’s Jaelynn Schauman takes a shot at the rim during a Tomahawk Division girls basketball game against Cedar Mountain at Cedar Mountain High School on Friday.

Steffl finished the game with 23 points, nine rebounds, 10 assists and five steals, while Kendra Lueck had 15 points, four rebounds and three steals and Kendra Erickson had 9 points and seven rebounds for the Cougars.

Alexis Hoffmann led the Indians with 11 points, while Berkner and Jaelynn Schauman each had 8 points.

Cedar Mountain jumped out to a 12-4 lead on a pair of 3-pointers from Grace Hamre and three layups from Steffl. Sleepy Eye stabilized with a steal leading to a layup from Jaelynn Schauman and a transition layup from Hoffmann, but Steffl continued to bring offense for Cedar Mountain with a 3-pointer. The Cougars continued to play strong defense, taking the lead out to 24-8 after a pair of steals leading to layups for Steffl.

Sleepy Eye got the offense going with a series of free throws from Jaelynn Schauman and Alexis Hoffman to cut the lead to 24-12, then Hoffmann hit a 3-pointer to make it a 26-18 game. Cedar Mountain’s offense stuttered in the mid parts of the game, allowing Sleepy Eye to hang around.

“We’ve got to find ways to continue to score,” Christensen said. “It’s kind of not making it happen on the defensive end and then that turns into some lulls that don’t create an opportunity to score. Something we have to work on going forward, we’ve had a few games where we go into a three-, four-minute lull, and it’s not like we’re not getting good shots or opportunities, we’re just not finishing or we’re not making them. Stuff we need to work on in the future.”

Lueck made a putback to give Cedar Mountain a 31-18 halftime lead, but Sleepy Eye continued to hang around in the second half, with a putback from Berkner making it a 42-31 game as the Cougars offense continued to stall.

Steffl said that the team sometimes feels the pressure to score individually if they are in a scoring rut.

“But I think what we need to think is we need to score as a team,” she said. “Instead of thinking ‘I need to score to get some points.’ Even including me, we all need to do that, and it will get better as the season goes along.”

However, a layup through contact by Steffl seemed to spark the offense once more as the Cougars went on their 10-3 run.

“At halftime we talked about finishing teams early,” Christensen said. “We get to a 10, 15 point lead and we go into a stall and don’t learn to finish games out. We had that against Tuesday night against Springfield too. At halftime we talked about once a team’s down we need to keep them there too and keep working at them. Our energy was a little higher in the second half and that was one of the biggest things that made it possible to pull away.”

A driving layup by Steffl put Cedar Mountain up 54-36, and the Cougars continued to push with a 3-pointer from Lueck and layups from Hamre and Lueck for a 61-38 lead. Cedar Mountain’s Laney Heibel made two layups as time wound down in the game.

Cedar Mountain (4-1, 4-0) plays at Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s on Monday, while Sleepy Eye (5-4, 2-3) plays next in a tournament at Southwest Minnesota State University on Dec. 29.