By Jeremy McDonald
Jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com
GERVAIS, Ore.– It’s been over a decade since the Delphian Girls Basketball team won a league game. February 12, 2014, against Nestucca at Nestucca to be exact in the old Northwest League.
Through the years since that win, the Dragons have been in-and-out with a varsity program. Some years, they’ll go JV, others like this year, they’re running a varsity schedule. And they’ve come close to breaking that drought this season as well prior to Monday’s 43-23 win at Gervais. Both their games with Chemawa were close battles with the Braves shutting the door on the Sheridan-based school
Against the Cougars on Monday in Tri-River Conference play, it was another fight and another opportunity to see if they could get over the hump and get that first league victory in nearly 11 years.
By halftime, the Dragons led 20-13. The shorthanded Gervais squad, with one substitute on their bench, kept it close with Maribel Guzman scoring eight of her 15 points in the first half alone to help pace the young Cougar squad.
But it was in the third quarter, the whole second half as a whole, that Delphian began to pull away. They used their length, their speed, their press and intensity to create those crucial stops and converted them into points. The Dragons led 29-20 after three.
“Delphian did a great job exploiting our weaknesses, so we just got to come back and attack like we know how to attack. We got to work the ball, move the ball to the outside,” starts Gervais’ Head Coach Steffani White. “We’re a fairly young team, I mean, I got five sophomores. Out there, I got one junior and one senior, and experiences in these times really do help.
“We definitely got fire to come out tomorrow, and I told the girls that I want to see the team that I know they can play. They compete.”
The two squads will face each other again Tuesday out in Sheridan at Delphian. But the Dragons will enter the rematch with some momentum as they continue to pull away from the Cougars. They built off of that third quarter success with what was working and pushed their lead to double-figures to eventually the 43-23 result behind a 14-3 fourth quarter to close out the game.
“The girls have been working hard for… many of those girls, it’s their third year. They’ve been learning, they’ve been working hard, and they almost got Chemawa earlier in the year during the season. So, to get a win, you saw how excited they were. They put it together today, and I’m happy, I’m proud of them,” said Delphian Head Coach Brandon Lidgard. “We’ve tried in several games to get the press going, and we finally got some good production from it, and we were able to pull away.
“Gervais, they play hard. They played hard. They’re going to try to figure out ways to beat the press, and our girls are going to have to execute.”
The two teams will tip it off again Tuesday at 5:30pm at Delphian School in Sheridan.
