Lady Yellowjacket hits Lakeside with 40-point display
The Lady Rams scored over 60 points for only the second time this season Friday night, but it wasn’t enough to overcome Sheridan.
Lakeside (11-9, 7-5 5A-south) held no answer for the Lady Yellowjackets’ Brooklyn Rowe. Rowe ended the game with 40 points and led her team to an 81-66 win.
Rowe captured imagination with her performance, but most of the Sheridan roster remained hot from the field throughout the contest. The Lady Yellowjackets (13-7, 10-2) made 16 3-pointers, including six from Kayden Porter.
“We’ve got to put some of the onus on us,” Lakeside head coach Jay Williams said. “We just didn’t do a good job of containing the perimeter. We’ve got to really work on and buckle down on keeping girls out of the paint.”
Sheridan controlled the game from the start, leading 49-31 at halftime and 72-49 at the end of the third quarter.
“I felt like we just let them all night get easy drives to the basket which made our defense collapse and they were able to kick, hit wide open threes,” Williams said. “They even hit contested threes. Defensively we just didn’t have it tonight. Offense we were fine. When you score 66 points, you’re supposed to win the ball game.”
Although the Lady Rams struggled tremendously on defense, Lakeside’s offensive stars put in their usual shifts. Amelia Rogers scored 20, and Allie Pollock led the Lady Rams with 31 points.
“That’s what Allie does,” Williams said. “If they play us in man and don’t double down, she’s a problem to handle. She’s going to score down there in the paint. It’s got to go back to the
defensive effort. That’s the one thing that we really focused on before the game, and we just didn’t do a good job defensively tonight.”
Lakeside struggled with the one-two punch of Rowe and Porter from the beginning of the contest. Rowe accounted for 18 points in the first quarter alone.
“She has the ability to score like that, shoot like that every night,” Sheridan head coach Jamison Ingram said. “When you have a player like Porter who they have to pay so much attention to then it just opens it up for big time scoring from either one of those two. She’s shooting the ball phenomenally. I mean it’s amazing how she’s shooting it. I think she might be one of the hottest shooters in the state of Arkansas right now.”
Porter finished with 22 points.
With the state tournament on the horizon, Ingram emphasized her team has to get better defensively. If the Lady Yellowjackets can continue shooting like they did Friday and improve their defense, they could be a challenge for teams in the state tournament.
“That’s what we think we’re capable of shooting,” Ingram said. “That’s what we strive to be. We know we have to be that because of our lack of height sometimes. We’ve been waiting on it. We’ve been waiting on that kind of a night. We needed it. We had to have it tonight.”
Lakeside must battle to get into the state tournament in the Lady Rams’ final four games of the season. Benton, Sheridan and El Dorado all have 10 wins or more in the conference standings, and Lakeside and Lake Hamilton both sit at 7-5 in the league.
Lakeside faces Hot Springs, El Dorado, Pine Bluff and Benton to finish the regular season.
“They understand the situation that we’re in,” Williams said. “We didn’t want to drop tonight, but you’ve got to tip your hat to Sheridan. They came out and did what they needed to do. We’ve got to regain our focus. We’ve got four games. We’re really going to push to win three of those games. That’s just our short term goal. Hopefully we can make it happen.”