SPALDING GIRLS BASKETBALL LOSES FIRST GAME TO ST. FRANCES
Sluggish first quarter costly as depleted Spalding falls to St. Frances
As St. Frances Academy approaches the final stretch of Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland A Conference play, all of the right pieces are falling into place.
That much was evident as the Panthers dominated Archbishop Spalding from start to finish, spoiling the Cavaliers’ perfect record and evening their own mark to .500 with a 76-51 win.
“We got the losses early. We knew what we needed to get back and work on and play our conference games,” said St. Frances senior Aniya Gourdine, who led her team with 23 points. “Now we’re just locked in, trying to finish our conference out strong.”
The Panthers had a win on Monday, recovering from a tough stretch against three Washington Catholic Athletic Conference teams. But St. Frances wanted to test its mettle against “top tier” teams, coach Jerome Shelton said. Now
battle tested, they are more than ready to face the road ahead.
“All of our last games are IAAM teams. We feel like our team is playing pretty good ball now,” Shelton said. “We’re jelling, coming together. Everybody scored tonight and they played with a purpose.”
What was obvious Thursday was that St. Frances did its homework on Spalding’s best shooters, swarming to double- and triple-team whichever unlucky Cavaliers player had the ball. Spalding didn’t make a basket until there was less than two minutes left in the first quarter as it rushed shots, and it turned the ball over eight times in the first half as a result.
“Our focus was on the Sims sisters … ‘cause they’re going to score,” Shelton said of Koi and Kamari Sims (12 points). “They’re good ballplayers. We focused on keeping their numbers to a minimum to try to make the other players beat us. We didn’t think the other players would be able to beat us.”
Spalding was also not at full strength, and with a temporarily depleted roster, players took on unfamiliar roles and were more easily unsettled by a constantly changing St. Frances defense.
First-year coach Joe Mathews doesn’t expect his team to be out of sorts for long, however.
“It just took us out of our rhythm, but we’ll be fine,” Mathews said. “I’d love to be able to play them again under different circumstances, but we were flat and didn’t execute and didn’t react to pressure well in the beginning of the game.”
Panthers junior Jalyn Brown caught fire early. The junior spearheaded an 8-0 streak to open the quarter. Though St. Frances struggled in Spalding’s zone in the middle of the quarter, its shooters finessed the Cavaliers’ defense and took an 18-4 lead into the second frame.
Facing such a deficit, the hosts desperately needed to open the second quarter hot. At first, that’s what they did — led by senior Koi Sims and Mariah Sanabia (12 points), Spalding strung a 9-3 run together — and they crept back into the game.
But just as the Cavaliers began to move more fluidly, so did the Panthers. With Brown and Gourdine commanding the floor, St. Frances rattled off a few triples to arrest their hosts’ momentum and then continued to make basket after basket, even extending its lead to 19 points by half ’s end, 40-21.
“Aniya’s coming along as a leader. That’s been our other missing part. We brought in Jalyn Brown, and we expect her and Aniya to aid the team,” Shelton said. “They’re like silent leaders in a way, but they’re starting to become more vocal. As you can see, it’s matriculating over to our game.”
The Panthers fell quiet for most the third but Spalding’s deficit proved too much to overcome. By the time other Panthers made a couple from deep range, Spalding trailed 58-33 with one quarter left.
Spalding did narrow the deficit in the last minutes. That’s something Gourdine knows St. Frances ought to remember going forward.
“We have to play smarter and stay on the whole game,” she said. “We don’t want to give anybody a chance to come back, if it’s a closer game. We want to make stops.”