By Jeremy McDonald
Jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com
DALLAS, Ore.– The McKay Girls Basketball team came ready to play Friday night against Dallas.
The Scots, who are playing an Independent schedule this season to build up their program after graduating six seniors from last year’s three-victory season, led the Dragons 13-6 early in the second quarter.
Having two victories to this point this season, the Scots have already seen development from their younger players to help, hopefully, set them up for success moving into next season when they get bumped back up to 6A.
“It’s been huge. Our league is tough, the Mid-Willamette league is tough, so we decided that with this group and we’re so young, we wanted to get more competitive games, which we’ve had a lot,” starts McKay Head Coach Ryan Kuboyama. “We’ve lost a couple of games within five points, ten points and we’re hoping that this gives our girls experience with close games and hopefully we can translate that into more wins in the future.”
For Dallas, despite their slow start to the game, used their 1-3-1 defense to their advantage in the second quarter to not get back into the game, but to take a 21-15 lead into the halftime break over the Scots. The Dragons managed to push their lead to double-figures into the second half, leading McKay 42-31 with 2:53 left in the game.
“We developed our communication way better and we just wanted this win. At the beginning of the (second) quarter, it was, ‘oh maybe we’ll come out here’, but it just clicked for us that we wanted this win and we needed it, so we just locked in,” said Dallas’ Ruby Halligan.
But the Scots weren’t done yet. They kept this game around that ten-point range for much of the half, and weren’t done yet as they cut the 11-point deficit down to five with 41.8 seconds remaining in the game. It was 44-39 at this point of the non-league contest.
“We prepared really well the last two days and rep what kind of defense they’re going to do…Dallas has been great on defense and they got that great 1-3-1 that we’ve worked the last two days of, ‘hey this is how we attack and this is our game plan coming into this game,” Kuboyama said. “Our girls did a great job of executing tonight and we’re proud of them for that.”
The Dragons dug deep, they held McKay scoreless in those final 41 seconds to walk away with their fourth victory of the season, defeating McKay 46-39.
“It was big. We’ve had games like this where we were so close to winning and almost closing out on them, but we hadn’t finish it and it felt really good to finish a game and knowing that we can finish a game no matter what,” said Halligan.
Halligan led Dallas with 12 points. Ameyah Higheagle led the Scots with 13 points. McKay will be at 4A Estacada on Tuesday while Dallas will be at Woodburn on Tuesday.
Photos By Jeremy McDonald
