Girls Basketball: Young holds off pesky Montini
Willowbrook High School hosted the 22nd annual McDonald's girls basketball shootout tournament on Jan 13,14 and 16. Montini played Whitney Young on 1/16. Montini's Nikia Edom with the ball during the game. The final score was Whitney Young 64 and Montini 56.
| Tamara Bell~Sun Times Media
Updated: January 17, 2012 7:41PM
Being the biggest fish in the pond means somebody is always nipping at your tail.
Leading by as many as 15 points in the first half and 19 in the third quarter, No. 1 Young appeared on the verge of putting some serious distance between itself and Montini Saturday at the McDonald’s Classic.
But the Broncos refused to go away quietly.
No. 12 Montini got within 58-50 on a pair of free throws by Nikia Edom with 2:16 remaining, but that was as close as the Broncos would get as the Dolphins remained unbeaten through 17 games with a 64-56 victory at Willowbrook.
Janee Thompson led Young with 19 points and Linnae Harper (16 rebounds) and Alexis Lloyd each had 16 points.
“To a certain extend we’re happy with the win,” Thompson said. “We’ll take the win. We really didn’t finish off the game the way we wanted to. There was a time in the game we went up maybe 18 points. We felt we could have pushed the lead to even more.
“Then we had a couple mental lapses and we allowed them to get back into the game a little bit,” she added. “I missed a couple of free throws and so did my teammates that could have pushed the lead to more. We just need to stay focused.”
Young still led 58-40 with 5:34 remaining when Montini (19-5) went on a 10-0 run sparked by a three-pointer by Kateri Stone (20 points). Young aided the cause by missing the front end of two bonus opportunities within a span of 29 seconds.
“I’m not at all happy with the way we finished,” Young coach Corry Irvin said. “I mean it is what it is. I thought we finished unfocused. I thought we had spurts where we played focused and spurts where we weren’t focused at all.”
Jasmine Lumpkin added 12 points for Montini, which was hurt by 20 turnovers and a 41-22 rebounding disadvantage.
“We’re our own worst enemy,” Montini coach Jason Nichols said. “I told the kids. ‘They’re going to kill you on the glass and they’re going to kill you with pressure.’ We didn’t handle the pressure great, but we didn’t handle it bad either.
“If we eliminate second-chance opportunities and make some free throws, we might have beaten them,” he added. “There were some good signs, there was some good stuff. We thought we could get to the basket whenever we wanted to and we did.
“But we got killed on the glass and we didn’t hit free throws again when we needed to,” Nichols said.
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