WENATCHEE — Kassy Larson was so focused on her responsibilities that she had no idea that the Wenatchee Valley College women’s basketball team was down by 18 points about 10 minutes into its Wednesday game against Spokane at Smith Gymnasium. After picking up her second foul, the Knights post finally looked up at the scoreboard and realized the gravity of the Knights’ predicament.

From that point on, Larson and her teammates began to play with much more energy and precision, and actually outplayed the Sasquatch during the last 30 minutes of the contest. But the early deficit proved to be too big to overcome, and the Knights dropped their second straight Northwest Athletic Association of Community Colleges East Region contest, 61-53.

“Honestly, I don’t know (what happened in the first half),” said Larson, who led the team with 16 points, 12 coming after halftime. “We were sluggish at the start. We learned a lesson, and we’re going to fix it.”

The Knights got back into the game in the second half by re-establishing their post game and limiting the Sasquatch’s quick, athletic guards from penetrating the lane. WVC got to within five points with 44 seconds left, but couldn’t complete the comeback.

“We battled back and proved that we could play with them,” said WVC coach Rachel Bromiley-Goetz. “But it’s hard to beat anybody down 18 points. That’s not what we had planned.”

For the first time this season, WVC (9-6, 0-2 East) has dropped two straight contests. The Knights will attempt to pick up their first East victory Saturday against Big Bend, and hope to correct some weaknesses that have been exposed in their last two defeats.

“We have to work on our transition game and be more aggressive on offense,” Bromiley-Goetz said. “A lot of the time we’re wanting our execution to be perfect. Sometimes you have to be able to adjust. When we do what we’re coached to do, it works. The system’s not broken. We just need to clean up some things offensively and buckle down on defense.”

“We need to hate losing,” Larson said. “We can’t let the past two games affect how we play in the future. We need to have quicker starts, and the mentality to work as hard as we possibly can no matter what the score is.”

Men’s basketball

Spokane 92, WVC 67

Several of the WVC men’s basketball team’s early-season non-region losses came as a result of first-half deficits that proved to be too large to overcome. On Wednesday, the Knights had the opposite problem.

They controlled much of the first half of their game against Spokane and went into halftime down by just two, but were completely dominated in the final 20 minutes in every phase of the game.

Spokane shot 50 percent from the field to WVC’s 38 percent, and scored 18 points off Knights turnovers.

“In the first half we came out like gangbusters. We held the lead for most of the first half and controlled the tempo,” said Knights coach Coby Weidenbach. “In the second half, (the Sasquatch) cranked things up, and we couldn’t match their intensity. You can’t play 28, 29 good minutes of basketball and win. It’s a 40-minute game.”

The Knights’ (6-9, 0-2) quest to put together a complete 40-minute performance has been hampered by some recent roster shuffling. WVC isn’t as deep as it was early on (Weidenbach utilized a seven-player rotation for the majority of Wednesday’s contest), but the coach believes that his top seven is good enough to win consistently in the East Region.

“We’ve showed spurts where we’re capable of beating the top teams in the East,” he said. “We just have to be more consistent.”

Patrick Manning led the Knights with 17 points and seven rebounds.