RAPID CITY, S.D. — The SKC Lady Bison put on a strong showing at the AIHEC basketball championships two weeks ago and placed third while playing against the best tribal college competition in the country.

“We represented SKC and the Flathead Indian Reservation well,” Lady Bison head coach Juan Perez said. “The girls went out and played hard. That’s all I can ask of them.”

SKC posted an impressive 6-1 record at the tournament and blew through pool play with a perfect 4-0 record in the first two days of the tournament.

“We kind of had to work our way back in some of the pool play games,” Perez said. “But out conditioning was superior to the teams that were there.”

That gave the Lady Bison a No. 1 seed heading into bracket play. They won their first-round game against Fort Peck by 20 points. 

“We played really well in that game,” Perez said. “The girls were good at making a lot of fast-break plays.”

In the semifinals, Oglala Lakota College handed the Lady Bison their first defeat of the tournament after a poor shooting night for SKC. Despite the shooting woes, the Lady Bison lost by just nine points.

“We had a lot of open shots but we just weren’t finishing them,” Perez said. “In the first half, we had 29 missed shots and a lot of them were close shots. If we would have made half our missed shots we would have won the game.”

That put SKC in the third-place game against Blackfeet Community College and the Lady Bison came away with a four-point victory, despite further shooting troubles.

Three of SKC’s players made the all-tournament team. Eva Green, Lisa Bible and Chantel Jenkins provided a core “Big Three” akin to the Boston Celtics and it showed out on the basketball court.

“They had a good tournament and they put in a lot of time out on the court leading up to those final two games,” Perez said.

SKC player Kayla Johnson received Academic All-American honors for earning a 4.0 GPA in her studies. The Lady Bison also had seven players on the honor roll for this quarter.

“It’s really good for us because it shows that the team works hard out on the court and in the classroom as well,” Perez said. “I think we’ll have a pretty good team next year. I’ve already had inquiries about next year’s team from players who want to go to SKC.”

And with SKC’s goal every season of a national championship, it looks as if the Lady Bison will use this third-place finish as a stepping stone and look to dominate the AIHEC tournament once again.