The Big Sandy Mountaineer -

The Big Sandy girls could not keep pace with Chinook and Hays-Lodgepole in their first pair of league matchups this season.

In the 9C opener Friday, the Lady Pioneers kept it competitive with the Sugarbeeters but fell 47-34 on the road, led by 13 points from senior Lainey Gregory.

The home opener a night later proved an even tougher challenge.

Hays-Lodgepole employed suffocating defense to force Pioneer turnovers and a devastating deluge of three-pointers out on the perimeter to win 62-14.

"They're tall. They're hard to defend when they have five girls who can go low or high," Lady Pioneers coach Pete Jerrel said. "They were able to speed us up and get us out of our comfort zone."

The entirety of the Pioneers' offensive production consisted of a pair of Gregory free throws and another from senior Amanda Cline until Gregory sank one from the field a little more than a minute into the second quarter.

There were positives for Big Sandy in the loss that dropped them 1-3 for the season, 0-2 in conference play.

"We stayed out of foul trouble. We broke some press," Jerrel said. "We tried to find who could come on (the floor) and bring us some nice energy."

A sequence of the latter came when freshman Jaycee Worrall came off the bench and gave Big Sandy its first consecutive possessions of unanswered scoring. Worrall sank one of two from the line to close the third quarter before adding a bucket that opened the final stanza.

Gregory led the Pioneers with 5 points followed by Worrall and Cline with 3 apiece. Senior Bailey Gasvoda added a third-quarter bucket and freshman Mia Dilworth tallied 1 at the charity stripe.

Jerrel said improved ballhandling and increasing the tempo in practice to better prepare for game speed will be the focus for his team going into the holiday break.

"There's a lot of good players in the 9C," he said. "We've got to speed up so we're not surprised."