Breakaway Queens

Highland looked weak coming into the second half. The Huskies, in spite of their noticeable size advantage, couldn’t match the speed or handle the defense of the Lady Raiders — as evidenced by Gabriel’s eight steals on the game. Gabriel scored the first bucket of the half on a swashbuckling cut to the hoop, which was followed in the next minute by a bucket on an almost-full court lob pass directly into the hands of Wilkinson from Gabriel. Red Hook’s Rae Levenson buried a standing two-point field goal to end the quarter, 38-27.

By the start of the fourth quarter, the Huskies were completely spent. Highland could only muster one field goal against Red’s guard-heavy, defense-first squad in the final period. The Lady Raiders pulled away toward the end; the final minutes were owned by Red Hook, which capped the game with the exclamation point of a Wilkinson 3 with 1:24 left on the clock. White sent out the second team with a minute to go.

“This was a good, quality team win,” White told The Observer after the game. “I was very happy that we pulled together. We had some moments when we were turning the ball over too much — we had 19 turnovers. We took a timeout in the third quarter and I asked them ‘How bad do you guys really want to win this game?’ They hunkered down and decided to play some good passing defense and get in the passing lane — we had some big steals.”

Wilkinson was the game’s top scorer, with 21 points.

[nggallery id=2]
Photos by Kristofer Munn

Facebook Comments

Enjoy having this local, independent, nonprofit news source? Help us keep reporting and become a member today. Already a member? Sign in to get rid of this notice.