Pine Hill overcomes slow early pace to stay undefeated
REHOBOTH, N.M.
For a team that averages 65 points, the Pine Hill girls’ basketball team proceeded at a glacial pace at the start of Thursday night’s nondistrict contest with Rehoboth.
Midway through the third quarter the Lady Warriors had put up 24 points as they trailed Rehoboth by seven points.
But in the final 12 minutes of play, Pine Hill went on a tear, outscoring the Lady Lynx by a whopping 36-14 run to secure a 60-45 win to remain undefeated.
Pine Hill enters Monday night’s game with Navajo Pine at 5-0.
“We played horrible in that first half and I don’t know what was going on,” Pine Hill coach Carletts Daniels said. “I don’t know if it was fatigue or what but then we stepped it up defensively. We started to run our system and we started to get some good scores.”
Daniels said it was a struggle to finally get things going as Rehoboth kept the pace of the game to its liking as the Lynx made a few extra passes to find the best available shot.
“We usually run and get easy points but (the Lynx) were beating us down the court,” he said. “Once we stop them transitioning and when we started playing better defense we started to score a little better because we couldn’t buy a basket and we weren’t shooting enough in that first half.”
By pushing the pace, Pine Hill senior Maurie Daniels scored 18 of her game-high 24 points late in the second half while teammate Bailey Nez put in 10 of her 13.
“I knew that we weren’t doing the things that we usually do, which is running up and down the court,” Maurie Daniels said. “We weren’t crashing the boards and I think we just came out tired and slow.”
The Pine Hill guard said their defensive intensity went up a couple of notches and that turned the tables as the Warriors used 14-0 run to erase that seven-point deficit and turned it into a 38-31 cushion at the start of the fourth.
“We got really intense, and we just took the open lane away from them,” she said. “That is what changed for us.”
Rehoboth coach Adrian Pete said Pine Hill adjusted to what they were doing but as the game wore on his team grew tired.
“We were doing really well defensively in the first half,” he said. “We were getting some stops and, you know, the Daniels girl is a tough player. We wanted to stay disciplined and try to stop her and we did that but conditioning became a factor.
“We stopped boxing out, and we stopped doing the things we were doing in the first half,” he added. “We didn’t take care of the ball either and then we have to put the ball in the hoop. There were times where we had some easy layups. You gotta put the ball in the hoop and you gotta make layups.”
Senior guard Kendace Gilmore led the Lynx with a dozen points while Jessica Lee added 11.
Rehoboth will start district play on Saturday by hosting Navajo Pine at 1 p.m. The two teams will play again on April 30 in Navajo, New Mexico.
The winner of the two-team district will earned an automatic bid to next month’s Class 2A state playoffs.
“We know what Navajo Pine does and we know about Jordan Louis,” Pete said. “It’s going to be a good game and, you know, it basically comes down to who wins twice. They’re going to be the district champion. If we want to go to state we have to beat Navajo Pine, and we got to beat them twice.”
Highway 264,
I-40, WB @ Winslow