‘Business trip’ for Central-Southeastern girls off to good start with first-round rout

NORMAL, Ill. — Central-Southeastern girls basketball coach Matt Long calls his team’s annual trip to the State Farm Holiday Classic a “business trip.”

“One of the biggest reasons why we come here is we’ve won a lot of big games here over the years,” Long said after his team, the No. 1 seed in the small school bracket, crushed Stanford Olympia 77-42 in a first-round game at Normal Community High School.

“We felt like we weren’t always the best team on the floor, but we were prepared from being smarter, game planning, making the adjustments. This is like a postseason (tournament) to us. That’s how we view it. We tell them this is the early postseason.”

The Panthers (12-2) will play at 4:30 p.m. Friday in the quarterfinals against Winnebago, which successfully defended a last-second shot by Port Byron Riverdale to win its first-round game 42-40.

Agnes Genenbacher, a junior who converted back-to-back three-point plays in the third quarter of Thursday’s rout, is spending her third holiday season in Bloomington-Normal. She knows the team’s focus remains on basketball.

“There’s a time to have fun, and there’s a time to get yourself ready for the game and be serious,” she said. “We walk through, and (Long) prepares us, and we watch a ton of film. He gives us all film. He does clips for us. He’s the main reason how good we are as a team, because he prepares us so well. We just get everyone together (in the hotel), and we’ll watch film together.”

The film from Thursday — especially the first quarter — was pretty good.

Lauren Miller scored 19 of her game-high 27 points in the first quarter as the Panthers raced to a 30-10 lead. Stanford Olympia (2-10) turned the ball over 12 times in the first eight minutes and didn’t score until Grace Small scored from inside the lane with 3:32 remaining in the first quarter. By then, CSE led 16-0.

The Spartans never got closer than 15 points after that. 

Central-Southeastern forced 37 turnovers, and its defensive pressure led to plenty of shots. The Panthers made 34 of 72 shots from the field, despite making just 4 of 23 from 3-point range.

Freshman Lexi Niekamp scored 13 points, senior Karly Peters contributed 11 and Genenbacher finished with 10.

While defending last year’s State Farm Classic title is the priority this weekend, Genenbacher said Long will occasionally schedule “fun.” 

“It’s more like team bonding,” she said. “I feel like coming here just gets us … well, it’s like we bond more. We just come together as a team. We always play better after this tournament. We’re always together. We’ll go in each other’s rooms (during the tournament), and if there are any adjoining rooms, the doors will be open. It’s like a family.”

Long says the fun depends on the year and the team.

“Sometimes they’ll get to go shopping (at the Eastland Mall) for a couple hours in the afternoon,” he said. “We let them walk across the street without their mommies over there, and they enjoy that. They think they’re adults. 

“You know, it’s just fun at the hotel. It’s crazy how much fun they have in the hotel, sitting around and goofing around and telling stories and making TikTok videos, whatever it may be. Most of it, I probably don’t want to know what it is.”

Genenbacher is counting on the shopping trip.

“Hopefully, maybe,” she said. “The parents might not be too happy about that because we just had Christmas.”