The women’s varsity basketball team lost to the undefeated Joppatowne Mariners 63-51 on December 18.

The Mariners are a “top 10 team in the metropolitan area, probably the best team we’ll play all year,” said Coach Mike Blizzard.

Despite the loss, Blizzard was proud of the team’s performance.

“We’re still very, very young, but I’m happy where we are right now. We put forth our best effort. We’re a brand new program, getting better and better every day,” said Blizzard.

The Patriots won the opening tipoff. Sophomore Emily Soller put the Patriots on the scoreboard, scoring the first points of the game. The Mariners were able to recover quickly and ended the first quarter with the lead, 14 to 9.

The second quarter was the only quarter that the Patriots ended with a lead, 29 to 28.

The entire game was riddled with fouls against the Patriots.

When asked how he felt about the calls, Blizzard said, “Doesn’t matter what I think about [the] calls. The only one that matters is the guy wearing the Footlocker jersey.”

Sophomore Miranda Ripken felt that “we did get a little out of hand a little bit with the refs making calls and the parents yelling. We just need to settle down and play our game.”

Overall, junior Amanda Wolfe said, “We played really well. I think we’ve come a long way since last year. If we can hang with them, we can pretty much hang with anybody.”

As for what could have been done differently, Blizzard felt that he shouldn’t have “ended the game with two time outs” and that the team needs to  “just perfect our execution.”

This echoed Ripken’s feelings that we “could have executed a bit more on some of our plays” and that “I think we did work well together when we did have our spurts. We need to work on playing 32 minutes of basketball, not six minutes spurts.”

The Patriots have their hopes set on winning the championship.

“Yeah, I want to win the [IAAM] B Conference. Let’s put a 2010 up there,” said Ripken.

 Alex Dunn can be reached for comment at [email protected]

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