Lady Jackets in first Final Four ever
Another night of balanced scoring fuels Yellow Jacket win
For the first time in program history, the Calhoun High School girls basketball team played in the GHSA 5A Final Four.
With a solid 62-52 win over Arabia Mountain Tuesday night at the noisy Hive in the GHSA 5A quarterfinals, the Lady Jackets advanced to the Final Four against Warner Robins Friday afternoon at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton. (Details of that game were not available at press time).
“It feels great to still be playing right now,” Calhoun head girls basketball coach Jaime Echols said. “Last week, you maybe thought about the Final Four, but you couldn’t really look ahead because you had to still had so much work to do to get there. But now that we’re here, the girls should feel very good about what they’ve accomplished. But we’re not in the Final Four to just be there...we want to play twice and so we’ve still got a lot of work to do.
“But no matter what happens this group will always be the team that made it to the Final Four and it’s something they’ll remember the rest of their lives. In the future, when they have reunions and get together, it’s something they will talk about and remember. It’s still one game at a time because you have to win to get to play again, but when you get those close, you can’t help but think about (the championship game) because you have a realistic shot with just four teams still playing.”
Warner Robins, which was the second seed out of Region 2-5A, brought a 27-3
record into the game and one of those losses was to a
team from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Like Calhoun, the
Demons are red-hot right now, entering Friday’s fray with a 10-game win streak.
“They’re very good,” Echols said of the Lady Demons. “They’re really a complete team. They have great guard play. They have a very good big girl inside. They’re athletic. They’re well-coached. They’re just going to be another tough test for us, but it’s the Final Four, so we wouldn’t expect anything else.”
In their win over spunky Arabia Mountain to get within two victories of a state crown, the Lady Jackets had good balance offensively and all five of their starters again played their hearts out.
“The girls are playing very well right now and I couldn’t be more proud of them,” Echols said. “I think we’re good enough that if we play hard, and our girls do play hard, we can compete with anyone in the state. And I’ve told them that since the summer. I feel like right now we’re playing at a very high level and all five of our starters are doing a great job and if we’ll just keep playing hard every possession, whether we’re on offense or defense, we’ve always got a chance.”
Sophomore guard Saniah Dorsey led the team with 22 points and then senior guards Britiya Curtis and Lauren Watson and sophomore forward Kat Atha had 12 points apiece.
“That’s what we’re looking for,” Echols said. “All year, when we’ve had that type of balanced scoring, and we have had it for the most part, we’ve been very hard to beat.”
He said for his trio of starting tenth graders, the Final Four will only help their future games.
“This is going to be great
for our three sophomores as far as the getting the experience of playing in big games,” Echols said. “I mean they’ve done a great job this season, and they’ve played really well in these first three (playoff games), but the intensity rises a little more and things get a little more intense when you get this close, so this is going to be great for our team going forward, but our sophomores are the ones that will be back next year, knowing what it takes and the work you have to put in to be a Final Four team.”
Arabia Mountain was probably one of the most sizechallenged teams the Lady Yellow Jackets have faced this year, but they gang-rebounded and let the long ones fly with enough accuracy to stay right with Calhoun for quite a while.
“They were probably one of the few teams we’ve played that were smaller than us because we’re not very big,” Echols said. “But they were good. They play the way they want to play the game and are very good at it. I give the girls all the credit for the way we just kept playing hard.”
The Yellow Jackets were up just 33-32 two minutes into the third period when senior Lauren Watson hit back-to-back 3s in a span of 35 seconds to begin their breakaway, vaulting their advantage to 39-32 with 5:35 left in the third.
Later with 90 seconds left in the quarter and just up 43-41, Dorsey hit a three and then Watson dropped in her third of the quarter, giving Calhoun a 49-41 lead with three frames in the books.
“That was a nice little run there,” Echols said. “Teams have really been defending Lauren the last couple of games. I mean she’s got someone on her everywhere she goes. But she can really shoot it and she was able to get a couple of good looks there and she made them count. She’s been patient the last couple of
games with someone on her all the time and her shoulder popped out a couple of times (Tuesday night), but she’s tough, like all our girls are, and she came up big in a couple of big spots there.”
A Dorsey lay-in 80 seconds into the fourth period gave Calhoun its first 10-point lead of the game at 51-41.
The closest the Lady Rams got to Calhoun after that was at 55-46 on a old-school 3-point play on a bucket-andone, but Watson delivered the dagger on the ensuing with her fourth and final three, elevating the Jackets’ margin to a dozen, 58-46, with just over two minutes to play.
With the win, Calhoun is now an amazing 26-4 on the season.
The winner of the CalhounWarner Robins game will face the winner of the Kell-Jackson (Atlanta) game 5:30 p.m. Thursday in the 5A finals in the Macon Coliseum.
The Lady Jackets got off to a strong start by outscoring Arabia Mountain 11-4 over the first six minutes of the
game with Dorsey scoring four on two layups while Curtis added four more on a layup and a wing jumper.
But the Lady Rams scored the final five points of the quarter to trail just 11-9 at the close of the first quarter.
Two baskets from Atha, with an Allie Duke threepoint shot in between, gave them an 18-11 lead two minutes into the second, before the Rams scored nine straight to take their first lead of the night at 20-18.
The game was then tied at 20 and 22 and then 25 on a Dorsey three-point play, but that began a Calhoun 9-0 run in the final two minutes to end the quarter that put the Yellow Jackets up 32-25 at halftime.
After Dorsey’s 3-point play tied it at 25, she hit a three out of the quarter and Curtis and Atha followed with pair of free throws each in the final minute to give the hosts the lead they would never surrender.
Arabia Mountain ended the year with a 27-3 record.