Just two full days removed from its first loss of the season — a narrow, 54-52 road loss to Washburn Rural on Tuesday — the Manhattan High girls basketball team could have used a sigh of relief Friday night against Highland Park. After all, the Lady Blues’ two primary offensive threats did considerable damage to MHS.

And a sigh of relief is just what the Lady Indians got.

It came in the form of a blowout 77-34 win over Highland Park on Homecoming night, and it was made possible by a series of aspects, some of Manhattan’s doing, some not.

MHS forced the Lady Scots into 24 total turnovers, a number of which were concocted by the Lady Indians’ full-court press.

Head coach Scott Mall attributed the takeaways his team’s swarming defense racked up to multiple areas.

“We’ve been working a lot on doing a lot of full-court pressure and traps and stuff, and the girls are getting better and better at it, and I thought they did a good job tonight,” he said. “And it’s a problem that Highland Park kind of has anyway. They’ve had some high-turnover games, so it was good to take advantage of that.”

Highland Park’s Don’tajah Jones was perhaps the lone bright spot for her team, a forward who tallied 11 points Friday night. With her in mind before the contest, Mall was pleased overall with how Manhattan defended Jones under the basket.

“I thought we did a good job,” Mall said. “The Jones girl is a very good low-post player. She posts up well and scores. She also moves really well, gets some boards; that’s where we got hurt early, because she was going to the boards a little bit on us, and we didn’t box out as well as we’d like to.”

Jones did the majority of her scoring in the first frame, posting five points. By then, though, the rout was already in order: Manhattan took a 25-8 lead into the second quarter.

Senior Madison Mittie, who finished with 12 points, said Mall emphasized getting out to the quick lead MHS seized.

“He definitely stressed it a lot,” Mittie said. “In the locker room, he said the past couple games, we haven’t gotten off to a great lead, so one of the things written on the board was to be focused from the tip.”

The margin grew even fatter in the second frame, due in large part to Manhattan’s continued use of the full-court pressure. On top of allowing a staunch three points, the Lady Indians forced another 11 turnovers in the second alone and turned several into breakaway baskets on the other end.

“I thought we played pretty good help defense,” Mittie said. “We were in the gaps a lot. We were able to see where they were going to pass it and jump out there.”

As the drubbing wore on into the third frame, Mittie and junior Gigi McAtee handled most of the scoring, but several freshmen made contributions over the course of the game, including Garrin Williams and Kia Wilson, who posted 10 and eight points each, respectively.

Mall was glad to see the contributions the freshmen made as a whole.

“I thought [Williams] played really well. She battled really tough, hit some shots, hit some outside shots; took advantage of some things inside,” Mall said. “We played both our big girls, Kennedy [Wilson] and Kia together, which they usually don’t. And I thought they did a really good job of playing together and helping to cut down the inside play.”

The Lady Indians got a game-high 15 points from McAtee in the win, four of which came in the second quarter that widened Manhattan’s lead the furthest of the contest.

Now sitting at 8-1 on the year, MHS gets nearly a week off until taking on Emporia on the road next Saturday, the lone Centennial League squad that has not lost in league play.

Mall is not taking Emporia lightly.

“We’re going to have to really sharpen our stuff up,” he said. “Emporia’s a tough team. They’ve got a really athletic junior class; they’ve really played well…. It’s one of those games where you’re going to have to stay focused and intense the whole game long.”

Mittie would like to see improvements on both sides of the ball.

“We definitely need to keep working on our defense,” she said. “And then keep working on moving the ball around and taking the right shots.”