Not a promising start for Huntley in their first game against South Elgin. But in the end, things came out just fine.

In the first quarter South Elgin was up by seven, but Huntley came back to tie it causing a timeout by South Elgin. By the end of the first quarter the score was 15-10 with Huntley in a lead.

“When we got down 7-0 I think our team responded well,” said head varsity coach Steve Raethz. “At one point they cut it (the score) to three, and I thought that we did a nice job of getting the lead back up to double digits.”

The Raiders were successful in keeping their lead throughout the second quarter of the game as well. By the end of the first half, Huntley was up 25-20.

By the end of the third quarter, the score was 42-35, and Huntley was confident they would come out with a win.

“I thought that there were certain junctures of the game when South Elgin made a run on us, that we did a nice job of creating our own run,” said Raethz. “We also did a good job of coming up with some stops when we needed to, especially in the second half.”

The final score of the game was 58-45 and Huntley’s confidence rose with the first win of the season.

“I thought that Kayla Barreto did a nice job of knocking down some shots for us as did Morgan Clausen,” said Raethz. “We want to have balance throughout the season from a scoring standpoint, but obviously we leaned on Ali in certain junctures to get us some baskets and she was able to do that.”

Junior Ali Andrews set a school record with 34 points in the game against South Elgin, this was almost half of the Red Raiders points. Not only is that a great achievement for Andrews, it’s a positive thing to have on the school’s record as well. Andrews’ previous highest points in one game was 28.

Defensively the Raiders are very strong and seem to be most confident on that end of the court. Defense is something that Huntley stresses and depends on to be one of the best parts of the team.