Charleston – Princeton’s girls basketball team tried to replicate the magic its football team did in December when it rallied from a fourth quarter deficit to beat Nitro in Charleston.
This round went to the Wildcats, though.
The No. 6-seeded Tigers started the game 2-of-15 from the field, watching a rally attempt fall short in the Class AAA quarterfinal matchup with No. 3 Nitro Wednesday morning in the Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center.
The win sends Nitro to the state semifinals for the third consecutive season where it will face the winner of Spring Valley-East Fairmont.
Trailing 26-11 at the half, Princeton made a charge in the third, outscoring Nitro 16-8, cutting the deficit to four points but watched it balloon back to 11 and spent the rest of the morning chasing.
“We got down in a hole early,” Princeton head coach Matt Smith said. “But the way these girls battled, I tell them all year, I’ll take this group of young ladies over anybody in the state of West Virginia. Any day. And they proved why I tell them that for that last 16 minutes of basketball they played, Maybe the coaches could’ve done a little more to get them settled in early. But I can’t fault the effort of the girls.”
For the Tigers there were a litany of issues pertaining to fundamentals.
They turned the ball over 20 times and shot just 38 percent (5-for-13) from the charity stripe. Nitro by comparison limited itself to 13 turnovers and netted 64 percent of its free throws (18-for-28). Their struggles form the field (26.8 percent) were offset by Nitro’s (27.7 percent)
“I think a lot of the free throws came from maybe tired legs,” Smith said. “When we put ourselves in a hole we asked a lot in that second half. Your mind tells your body it can’t do it. The environment – we’ve talked about it, the background’s different, the backdrop’s different. You can do what you want but there’s not many places you can sink a free throw with 200 crazy kids from Princeton behind the goal. ”
The Tigers missed their first eight field goals on the day, falling into a 12-0 hole, with all 12 points coming off turnovers.
“That’s kind of the way we play,” Nitro head coach Pat Jones said. “High, fast-intensity basketball with pressure defense,. We’ve done it all year and I think Matt had said the other day he thought we were going to come out and surprise him but I don’t have anything to surprise you with.
“That’s what we run – a fast man-to-man pressure defense where we turn you over once you get over half court and I thought the girls did a good job with it today. A couple of their ball handlers didn’t really have a strong left hand so we really wanted to force them to their left so they’d cross back over to their right and we’d get a steal for a layup.”
Abbey Honaker put Princeton on board on the Tigers’ ninth try, netting a layup through traffic with Natalie Rose later capping a three-point play for the other three Tiger points of the frame, though they trailed 16-5 at the end of it.
Princeton’s defense helped mitigate the offensive struggles as Nitro never made more than three field goals in any of the final three quarters but it took until the second half for the offense to catch up.
A short jumper from Brystal Winfrey broke the ice in the second half before a Tylar Burks 3 breathed life into the Princeton bench. Karson Jones split a pair of free throws to break up the run but Kylee Jackson connected on a pull-up 3 and Honker was good at the rim to cap a 10-1 run.
Nitro bumped there lead back to eight but buckets from Rose and Winfrey made it a 29-25 game with just over 10 minutes to play in the game. But the Wildcats used the size of Jones and their ability to get to the free throw line to build another cushion at 42-30.
The Tigers responded with one last run, a 7-0 charge featuring a 3 from Burks and three-point play from Jackson but they came no closer, going 1-of-4 from the free throw line in the final 80 seconds and missing several layups at the rim.
From there Nitro closed the game with a 4-of-6 showing from the line.
“Honestly we spend about 25-30 minuted every practice on free throws,” Jones said. “We do some layup drills, things like that. Spend 10 minutes shooting free throws, five on each end and we’ll go thorough some more things, 10 more minutes of free throws – five on each end and we’ll finish practice with 10 free throws, five on each end. Because at the end of the day if you’re going to win a state championship you’re going to have to knock down some free throws.”
Jones ld all players with 14 points and 12 rebounds while Bri Gibson and Bayleigh Elkins netted 11 each.
Honaker, who missed much of the last month with an ankle injury, led the Tigers off the bench with 10 points while Rose grabbed a game-high 15 rebounds.
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