EudoraNews.com

It’s that time of year again. The Eudora Cardinals basketball teams will play rival Baldwin Friday night on the road. For the Eudora girls it will be their first road game of the season.

The Cardinals went 5-1 before break, and Eudora girls coach Ryan Luke gave his squad about 10 days off before returning to practice last week.

“Things are looking really pretty good,” Luke said. “We’ve really done a lot of fundamentals stuff like conditioning and worked on shooting, just the little things we don’t have time to work on when the season gets going. So that’s been nice. We’ve done six days of that and now we have four days on getting ready for Baldwin.”

The Baldwin girls enter Friday night’s contest with a 4-1 record. Three seniors lead Baldwin: Tracie Weege, Clare Miles and Alex Zordel. Baldwin will have the obvious home-court advantage, but Eudora might have an edge in the paint with 5-foot-10 senior Haley Epperson.

“We have a really good post player and that’s where we like to start with our offense,” Luke said. “We want to get her involved inside and that too will open up our outside game.

“This game we really want to concentrate on what we do well and execute our offense.”

The Eudora girls beat Baldwin last year and the boys lost. The boys enter Friday night’s game with a 5-1 record and boys coach Kyle Deterding is hoping to leave the Baldwin gym with the team’s sixth win of the year.

“It should be a good atmosphere,” Deterding said. “They always have a good crowd at their home games because it’s a fun gym to play in and they’ve got a really nice team down there. So it should be fun.”

The Baldwin boys are 4-1 and are led by 6-foot-5 senior Brandon Tommer who averages 17.8 points a game. Baldwin also has 6-foot-4 senior Clad Kueffer and a 6-foot-8 sophomore in Justin Vander Tuig. He has yet to play this season because he was sick in December. It is unknown if he will play Friday.

The Cardinals will look to counter Baldwin’s height with some sharp shooting. Justin Ballock leads the Cards at 15 points a game and Brian Katzfey averages almost 10 points coming off the bench.

Eudora’s post players will be counted on to slow Baldwin’s inside game. Eudora has some height of its own with 6-foot-6 senior Michael Bricker, 6-foot-2 senior Cody Carlson, 6-foot-1 junior Drew Noble and 6-foot-2 junior Joel Lauer. That height lacks in comparison to Baldwin, but Lauer said Eudora would be tough inside.

“We just have to be ready to play tough defense on those posts because they’re our biggest concerns as of right now, in my mind,” Lauer said. “But we can probably get the crowd out of it if we shoot well. We just have to play well and concentrate on the game.”

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