By Jeremy McDonald
Jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com
SCIO, Ore.– The Scio Girls Basketball turned to their defense to separate themselves from Sheridan Monday night in PacWest Conference action at Scio High School.
The Loggers led 29-25 at the halftime break in their rematch with the Spartans, Scio had taken the first game on Sheridan on January 10 44-31, before they began to build up their lead. Their defense created turnovers, took account for Taylor Givens, and pushed the Spartans to the perimeter to try to limit their damage in the game.
By the end of the third quarter, Scio led 44-34.
“Taylor Givens, she is a stud. She’s a tremendous player, and she’s one of the best players in the league, and it was all about doing our best to not allow her to score. We gave up a couple outside shots now-and-then type of thing. It was a ‘stop the inside game’-type of thing,” said Scio Co-Head Coach Logan Ferguson. “If we can stop the inside game, we can take care of the outside game, and I felt like we did a pretty good job with that tonight.”
“We haven’t worked that well together, and it finally clicked, we’ve been practicing a lot better,” adds Kailey Westbrook. “We’re normally a defensive team, so it kind of surprised us when we all worked that well together.”
Sheridan cut the deficit back down to single-digits in the fourth quarter, but couldn’t overcome the deficit as they sit a game behind Willamina and Dayton for the final two spots in the league playoffs with four league games left in the regular season. Fouls slowed down the Spartans in those final eight minutes Monday, but the squad is confident that they can get it done down the stretch to get into the PacWest League Playoffs here in a few weeks.
“Fouling, it really got out of hand. We could’ve gotten back in it. We just kept on fouling, and it just got out of hand for us,” starts Givens. “Just beating all the teams that we need to beat, our loss against Taft by only four, it really helped us. Like, ‘we got this, and we were really confident that at a neutral site. We’re really confident in ourselves.”
Givens and Logen Watkins each led the Spartans with ten points each. Chloe Ayala contributed another nine for Sheridan. Westbrook led the Loggers with 25 points, 15 coming in the second half. Honor Bagnall and Meagan Trissel each scored seven points for Scio, the Loggers head to Blanchet on Wednesday.
