HANCEVILLE - Basketball is more often than not a game of matchups, and Belgreen’s girls ran into a tough one Friday night in Hanceville.
The Lady Bulldogs are at their best when their deadeye shooters—of which they have many—get clean looks from the perimeter. They need space to be effective, and space was hard to come by in Friday’s Class 1A Northwest Regional semifinal against No. 9 Holy Spirit.
“We knew they had athleticism,” Belgreen coach Chad Green said of the Titans, who arrived in Hanceville with an impressive record of 22-2. “We knew they had quickness.”
Holy Spirit used that athleticism and quickness to harass the Lady Bulldogs all over the floor at Tom Drake Coliseum, riding a frenetic full-court press to a 19-point first-half lead and then pulling away late for a 58-33 win. The Titans (23-2) will face No. 2 Phillips (27-3) in the regional final on Tuesday.
“We’ve got some homework to do,” said Holy Spirit coach Char-Lette Jones-Pruitt, who was highly impressed with what she saw from Phillips’ girls in their regional semifinal win over reigning state champion R.A. Hubbard.
The Titans had clearly done their homework on Belgreen (20-11), and it showed on Friday evening.
“We let the players watch film on their own, and then after [the coaches] watched film we got together to talk about what we needed to do,” Jones-Pruitt said. “We knew which shooters we needed to take away on the wings, and we worked hard on our press, too. We work on the press all the time. We wanted to come out and try to force them to turn the ball over.”
Mission accomplished. With guards Marly Mills (five steals), Imani Thompson (four steals) and Laura Spence (four steals) setting an aggressive tone, Holy Spirit flustered the Lady Bulldogs into turnovers on their first five possessions of the game. Midway through the first quarter, Belgreen had turned the ball over nine times in ten trips and trailed 10-0.
“I don’t think you can lose a game in the first few minutes,” Green said, “but you can definitely dig yourself a hole that’s hard to get out of.”
The Lady Bulldogs, who had averaged 67.9 points per game while winning six of their last seven coming in, finished Friday’s first quarter 1-for-10 from the floor with 10 turnovers. They turned the ball over four more times in the first three minutes of the second quarter, and Thompson’s three-pointer at the 5:15 mark pushed Holy Spirit’s lead to 24-5.
“I think nerves got us a little bit early in the game,” Green said.
Belgreen finally started to settle in at the foul line, shooting 7-for-8 in the second quarter and closing the half on an 11-2 run. Despite shooting just 3-for-19 from the floor and committing 19 turnovers, the Lady Bulldogs found themselves down by just 10 points at 26-16 going into the break.
“We were still in it,” said Green, whose team out-rebounded Holy Spirit 26-13 in the first half and also benefited from poor shooting by the Titans (10-for-35 from the floor, 3-for-11 from the foul line). “It was a ten-point ball game. We were right there.”
The Titans continued to struggle in the third quarter, missing 15 of 18 shot attempts and committing eight turnovers of their own to leave the door wide open. Belgreen closed the quarter with layups from Ansley Tate, Katie Dempsey and Jasmine Martin, trimming the lead to seven at 33-26.
The Lady Bulldogs were still within eight at 40-32 after back-to-back buckets by Gabbie Moore early in the fourth, but ultimately their inability to do what they do best caught up with them. Belgreen, averaging nearly eight threes made per game over its previous seven games, finished 0-for-17 from beyond the arc on Friday. On the rare occasion when they got an open look from the perimeter, the Lady Bulldogs couldn’t get anything to fall.
“We didn’t shoot the ball like we normally do,” said Green, whose team had made 168 threes on the season coming in, with four different players having hit 24 or more. “We know it can be tougher to shoot the ball down here. It’s not like shooting in the local gym.”
Holy Spirit closed on an 18-1 run over the final five minutes to turn Friday’s game into a rout. Athletic senior post player Aryn Head finished with 17 points and 11 rebounds, and Thompson added 15 points. The Titans shot just 32 percent from the floor, but they finished with 20 more attempts than Belgreen—due in large part to the Lady Bulldogs’ 41 turnovers.
“We could have handled [the press] a lot better than we did,” said Moore, a junior guard who finished with a team-high 11 points.
Belgreen shot 23 percent (11-for-48) from the field and 11-for-17 from the line. Tate posted a double-double with 10 points and 10 boards, shooting 4-for-7 from the floor and 2-for-2 from the line. Katie Dempsey added seven points and eight rebounds.
Martin—the team’s only senior—had four points, four rebounds and five steals. Freshman post player Emma Dempsey had eight rebounds and three blocks to go along with her one point.
Despite the sour ending, Green made a point to praise his players at the post-game presser for their efforts and accomplishments this season.
“First and foremost, this is a great group of girls, all the way from our one senior down to our ninth-grader,” he said. “I’m proud of what they accomplished this season. We had twenty wins. We beat Red Bay, which we hadn’t done in a long time. We made it to the county championship game and lost to a really good Phil Campbell team. We made it to the area championship game and lost to a really good Phillips team. We went on the road in the sub-region and got a win at Marion County, which wasn’t easy to do.
“Jasmine has been a tremendous player for us, and we’re gonna miss her. But we’ll have everybody else back, Lord willing. Hopefully this experience of playing down here will be good for our girls and help us get over the hump next time.”