Garden City CC splits with Hutchinson, Women fall short, and Men race Blue Dragons out of gym

Garden City, KS (WesternKansasNews.com) – It was a good bounce-back performance for the Lady Broncbusters after suffering their worst loss of the season vs. Butler on Wednesday but they couldn’t keep up with Hutchinson. The Men meanwhile raced Hutchinson out of the gym breaking their patented press easily and scoring a season-high 117 points.

Women’s Basketball | Garden City 53 Hutchinson 71

Mya Williams had 17 1st quarter points for Hutchinson and would finish with 28 in the game. Her quick start had Garden City down early and they wouldn’t recover after that. 

The Busters trailed by 18 at the halftime break and were looking for answers all day long as they dropped their 4th straight game. The positives could be found with 3 double-figure scorers for Garden City as Dayshawna Carter led the way with 17 points, Taya Davis had 15, and Ariyah Brooks had a new season high with 11 points off the bench.

“Ariyah is always going to get better this is just her second game back after sitting out the first two of the new year, she has a lot of ability it just needs to come with more consistency,” said head coach Antwain Scales after the game. 

Garden City would battle in the 2nd half even getting the game within 9 points early in the 4th quarter but Mya Williams would take back over to put the Busters away. 

“We did some good things on defense early, but it just fell apart at the end of the game, we have a lot of girls play 35-40 minutes and you could see that breakdown at the end of the game,” Scales added in the postgame.

The Broncbusters dropped to (7-10) and (3-9) in Jayhawk play with a matchup with top 25-ranked Barton on Wednesday night. 

Men’s Basketball | Garden City 117 Hutchinson 97

Press, press, and press some more. That’s what Hutchinson wants to do every time a team matches up with the Blue Dragons. It is imperative that you are able to break that press in order to win.

While a challenging feat it’s always nice when you have players like Buru Naivalurua and Dajion Humphrey. Both had career high’s for the Busters with Humphrey netting 35 points and Naivalurua scoring 30 points and grabbing 11 rebounds.

“That’s the type of guys we have on this team and when they play like that we can beat anybody, said Head Coach Rusty Elmore.

Garden City and Hutch would battle back and forth but the Broncbusters started to pull away heading into the 2nd half up 6 points. From that point on Garden City would barely miss the bottom of the bucket and did what they needed to defensively. 

Naivalurua had a great game on offense but had an improbable matchup guarding the frontrunner for player of the year in the Jayhawk Conference, Aaron Franklin. Franklin leads the lead in points per game with 24.1 and 8.5 rebounds. 

“We gave Buru a huge challenge and responded so well for us, I’m just proud of him but we need more of that moving forward to win this league,” Elmore closed out his postgame interview.

Garden City draws a matchup with Barton on the road in the middle of the week and then rounds out the week with a home game vs. Coffeyville. Both team beat Garden City early in the year. All of Garden City’s games can be heard on 99.9 The Rock.