By Rob Patrick
NORTH LITTLE ROCK —The North Little Rock Lady Charging Wildcats have won the last three 7A-Central Conference championships and the year before that, they were second in the league but went on to win the Class 7A State championship. They’ve gone 46-2 in league games since the 2006-07 season including 27 consecutive league wins including Tuesday’s 82-44 romp over the Bryant Lady Hornets that made them 20-0 overall this season, 6-0 versus the league.
And it wasn’t their most lopsided victory this season. They’ve won games by 52 and 43.
In fact, the 44 points the Lady Hornets scored in the game was the most the Lady Cats have given up in a league game this season.[more]
Bryant came in with a 16-2 mark overall and a 4-1 conference record, giving them a chance to forge a tie for the league lead with a victory.But they’d have to do something no Lady Hornets team has done since the spring of 2005 just beating the Lady Wildcats and no Lady Hornets team has done at North Little Rock since December 2003.
The showdown lasted for about a quarter and a half. North Little Rock scored a whopping 32 points in the second quarter including a 25-4 run to nearly double Bryant’s point total.
The loss dropped the Lady Hornets into a second place tie in the conference with Conway and Bryant’s next opponent, Little Rock Central.
North Little Rock’s players were big and long, quick and strong. And the bench was deep. While Bryant has a lot of options with seven players that have scored in double figures at one time or another this season, the Lady Wildcats have even more weapons. They shot 60 percent from the field.
“I really felt like us playing not great and them playing pretty well led to what happened tonight,” stated Lady Hornets head coach Blake Condley. “They’re talented and they played hard. They got after loose balls and they came up a lot of those that, if we end up with them, it gives us an extra possession here and there. But we’ve got to play a lot better than we did tonight to be able to compete with them. They’ve got good size, good shooters — they’re very talented and they play hard. You know sometimes you get teams with great talent that won’t play hard. When you have talented teams that will play hard, it makes it tough.”
The game was rugged but it was close for a while though Bryant never led. North Little Rock held an 8-6 lead after Bryant’s Abbi Stearns scored on an inbounds play. Lady Cats’ senior Cassie Vaughn then scored 6 straight points and when Marissa Hawkins added two free throws, North Little Rock had its first double-digit lead.
A 3-pointer by Hannah Goshien got the Lady Hornets back in gear. Sandy Jackson answered for North Little Rock and the Lady Cats forced a turnover. But Stearns blocked a shot by Jackson and, at the other end, Haley Montgomery was fouled at the buzzer. Her free throws made it 18-11 (though the North Little Rock scoreboard operator looked down during the sequence and Montgomery, who shoots free throws quickly, knocked down both shots before he knew it. The score stayed 18-9 on the scoreboard and they wound up having to hold up the start of the second quarter to get it straightened out.
A three-point play by Stearns after grabbing an offensive rebound had Bryant within 18-14. After Jackson hit a 3, a pair of baskets by Kenzee Calley trimmed the lead to 21-18.
That’s when the Lady Cats began their explosion with a basket inside by sophomore Lexus Williams, who wound up hitting all eight of her field goal attempts on the way to 17 points and eight rebounds.
The Lady Wildcats repeatedly drove into the lane, drew the defense and dish off to Williams who never wandered very far away from the basket (though there were no three-second violations in the game.)
Vaughn added a layup and, after Calley answered, point guard Jerrica James hit a driving jumper. The Lady Cats forced a turnover (one of a season-high 21 for Bryant) and a three-point play by Williams made it 30-20.
Bryant’s Alana Morris scored inside with 4:37 left in the period but that proved to be the last Bryant field goal until Morris scored again with 5:16 left in the game. By then, however, North Little Rock had stacked up a 30-point lead, 54-24.
“I felt like we started okay,” Condley mentioned. “We missed a couple of shots, gave up a couple of easy baskets and they were just off. Once they got going, it was hard to even contain them much less stop them.”
The lead eventually grew to as much as 45, 75-30, early in the final period.
Vaughn matched Williams’ 17. Hawkins finished with 11.
Bryant was led by Calley and Morris with 9 each. Morris had a game-high 12 rebounds.
Condley, as he has throughout the season, said he wanted his team to learn from the contest and work to get better. Specifically, he said, “We’ve got to rotate a little better defensively. We were making our first rotation but we didn’t get that second rotation whenever they’d go to dump it off. We’d rotate to help on the penetration but we didn’t make that second rotation to get that girl that we rotated off of. So we’ve got to do that.
“Offensively, we’ve got to attack the rim but once we attack and the help comes, there were a few times we’d try to make a pass to try to set up a girl to score, there were a few where we weren’t even ready to catch and weren’t ready to shoot it once we did catch it.
“It was just little things that we’ve got to work on and got to fix,” he continued. “We need to fix them before Friday night because we’ll be playing a Central team that’ll do a lot of the same things that North Little Rock did.”
LADY CHARGING WILDCATS 82, LADY HORNETS 44
Score by quarters
BRYANT 11 13 6 14 — 44
North Little Rock 18 32 18 14 — 82
LADY HORNETS (16-3, 4-2) 44
Player fg-fga ft-fta reb fls pts
o-d-t
Montgomery 1-2 3-4 0-3 3 2 5
Goshien 3-8 0-0 0-1 1 0 8
Calley 4-10 1-2 0-2 2 1 9
Stearns 3-6 1-1 1-0 1 1 7
Morris 3-9 3-6 6-6 12 3 9
Parish 0-2 0-0 1-1 2 2 0
Johnson 1-6 0-0 0-0 0 1 2
Sory 0-0 0-0 0-1 1 0 0
Neal 1-2 0-0 0-0 0 1 2
Barker 0-0 0-0 0-0 0 0 0
Abernathy 0-0 0-0 0-0 0 1 0
Hogancamp 0-0 0-0 0-0 0 0 0
Lee 0-0 0-0 0-0 0 0 0
Ball 1-1 0-0 0-0 0 0 2
Team 1-1 2
Total 17-46 8-13 9-15 24 12 44
LADY CHARGING WILDCATS (20-0, 6-0) 82
Player fg-fga ft-fta reb fls pts
o-d-t
James 3-8 0-0 0-2 2 0 6
Jackson 3-5 0-0 0-1 1 3 7
Hawkins 3-7 5-5 1-0 1 2 11
Williams 8-8 1-1 2-6 8 2 17
Vaughn 6-9 4-5 2-2 4 2 17
Brown 3-4 0-0 0-1 1 1 8
Taylor 2-2 0-0 0-0 0 2 4
King 2-2 0-0 0-1 1 1 5
Patterson 0-2 0-0 0-1 1 1 0
Slocum 1-3 1-1 0-1 1 1 3
K.Brown 0-1 0-0 0-0 0 0 0
Hale 2-4 0-0 1-0 1 0 4
Team 0-5 5
Totals 33-55 11-12 6-21 27 15 82
Three-point field goals: Bryant 2-14 (Goshien 2-7, Johnson 0-4, Montgomery 0-1, Morris 0-1), North Little Rock 5-10 (Brown 2-2, Jackson 1-2, King 1-1, James 0-1, Hawkins 0-1, Patterson 0-1, Slocum 0-1). Turnovers: Bryant 21, North Little Rock 9.
