Recently during a game against Washington, which De Soto won, guards Kelsey Fisher, Shelbi Petty and Tami Crow played smothering defense, which led to easy layups in the first quarter. De Soto coach Dwight Spencer said the team had embraced playing pressure defense.

“When it’s working well, it sets up everything else well,” Spencer said. “And I like it because if you don’t get that chance to double team, you’ve still got everybody accounted for and you can still just play your solid defense.”

When the Wildcats aren’t scoring on easy fast-breaks, they play primarily perimeter offense in the half-court. Like the De Soto boys team, the girls also like to shoot threes. Fisher, Petty and Crow are threats from three-point land. Fisher, a 5-foot-5 junior, hit two threes against Washington and Petty, a 5-foot-3 sophomore hit two threes in the opening minutes against Paola.

De Soto opened the game against Paola with three three-pointers and had an early lead before the Wildcats went cold the rest of the night. De Soto scored just 13 points in the next two quarters

combined against Paola and lost by 24 points.

Junior Katie Williams and sophomores Ashely and Katie Gorman are De Soto’s post players. De Soto is not a tall team and if it is not hitting from the outside, the team doesn’t have enough scoring punch inside to make up for a cold shooting night.

“It’s hard,” Spencer said. “We don’t have the inside game that we can score when things aren’t going well from the outside.”

De Soto has beaten Maranatha and Washington and had two games, including a road contest at Atchison, wiped out because of bad weather in December.