HANCEVILLE - Coaches, by nature, are worriers, and Craig Thomas is no exception.
Heading into Thursday evening’s Top 5 showdown with Mars Hill in the Northwest Regional semifinals, Thomas’s chief concern was that his Phil Campbell girls—winners of 14 straight games and 41 days removed from their most recent loss—might slip up and stub their toe under the bright lights of Tom Drake Coliseum.
“I just hope we keep playing the way we’ve been playing,” Thomas said on Thursday afternoon, roughly three hours before his team was scheduled to take the floor. “I hope we play well.”
Five minutes into the game, Thomas’s fears were starting to look well founded. The Lady Bobcats (ranked No. 4 in Class 2A by the ASWA) had started 0-for-9 from the floor with five turnovers and were trailing third-ranked Mars Hill 10-2. They hadn’t yet laid an egg, but the nest was getting awfully warm.
Thomas, strangely enough, was less worried at that point than he had been in the hours leading up to the game.
“I always tell our girls, don’t get discouraged over the first two or three minutes,” he would later say. “If we get down five, six, seven points, they’re not gonna hold us there. We’ve got good enough shooters that the shots are gonna fall eventually. It’s just a matter of time before we make our run.”
Thomas didn’t necessarily feel that way about either of his two previous Phil Campbell teams that reached Hanceville, both of which were less experienced and more offensively challenged than his current squad [and both of which lost in the regional semifinals, in 2015 and 2016]. These Lady Bobcats have an abundance of weapons, and Thomas believed it was only a matter of time before that balanced arsenal started finding the mark.
Junior guard Dakota Elliott was the first to get going, scoring on a putback, nailing a left-wing three and dashing coast to coast for a layup off a defensive rebound to cut the deficit to 10-9. Sophomore guard Kallie Allen followed, knocking down a pair of threes to help Phil Campbell surge to a 19-15 lead midway through the second quarter.
Junior post player Abby Davis took it from there, splashing a corner three to send the Lady Bobcats into the locker room with a 24-21 lead and then dominating the third quarter with 14 points on 6-for-8 shooting as the margin swelled to 10 at 40-30.
The Lady Panthers, as one would expect from a team with their pedigree and big-game experience, made a run, cutting the lead all the way down to two with 5:15 remaining, but Phil Campbell answered the bell with clutch free throws from freshman guard Caitlynn Mills and senior guard Darby Elliott, who combined to go 7-for-9 from the line down the stretch.
When the final horn sounded, the Lady Bobcats had earned their 15th straight win, 55-46, and a berth in the Elite Eight. They’ll face Cold Springs (20-12) in the regional final on Monday at 3 p.m. with a trip to the Final Four on the line.
“These girls did a great job,” said Thomas, whose team improved to 25-5 overall and 15-1 since the calendar flipped to 2018. “We had a few more turnovers than we wanted, but we controlled the tempo of the game the way we liked it, and we made clutch shots when it came down to it. This whole group did an excellent job. We’ve been working hard for this all year.”
Improved though they may be offensively, the Lady Bobcats’ identity as a team still rests with their defense—a fact Thomas saw fit to drive home just before tip-off.
“Right before the ball game, we told our girls we were gonna win this game with defense,” he said. “I thought we did a really good job. I can’t say enough about how we guarded them.”
Mars Hill coach Jay Mitchell couldn’t say enough about Phil Campbell’s defense either—literally. Mitchell, whose team scored only 31 points over the final three quarters and finished the game shooting just 28 percent (15-for-54) from the floor, nearly bit through his tongue at the post-game presser in an effort to restrain himself from overtly criticizing the officiating, but his feelings couldn’t have been more clear.
“We didn’t run very good offense,” Mitchell said, “but that was due to Phil Campbell’s defense being very good…and other factors.”
Mitchell said that his team’s objective was to get the ball inside early and often to senior Annah Steadman, who finished with a team-high 11 points but shot just 4-for-12 from the field. She also went 3-for-5 from the foul line, but Mitchell clearly felt that Steadman was owed a few more free throws.
“We were trying to get Annah on the post as much as we could,” Mitchell said. “I felt like we got the ball down there pretty well. It just didn’t end well from there—through no fault of hers. It was pure effort on her part.”
Steadman, one of Mars Hill’s top two scorers on the season along with sophomore guard Neely Johns, was asked to comment on Phil Campbell’s defense.
“I thought it was pretty good,” she said, “and pretty tight.”
Thomas credited Allen and Dakota Elliott with making things tough on Steadman.
“I thought they both did a really good job,” he said. “The Steadman girl is a really good basketball player. We started with Kallie on her, and then we switched over to Dakota. She finished with eleven points, and she’s been getting about twenty a game, I would guess. She was definitely our main concern.
“Dakota did a great job tonight. She had one of the toughest assignments on defense we could haven given anybody this year, covering [Steadman], and she handled it well—her and Kallie both.”
The toughest assignment Mars Hill (23-9) faced was finding a way to contain Davis, Phil Campbell’s leading scorer on the season at 14.1 points per game coming in. The 5’11 junior started slowly, missing her first five shots of the night, before hitting a pull-up jumper and then a layup off an inbounds pass to put the Lady Bobcats on top 16-15 with 5:45 left in the first half.
Davis wound up scoring seven points in the second quarter, but that was merely the warm-up act. She was a force of nature in the third quarter, pouring in 10 points in a span of barely two minutes to push Phil Campbell’s lead out to seven at 34-27. She banked home a patented pull-up jumper in the lane at the 1:20 mark and then beat the buzzer with a 12-footer that bounced around the rim before dropping through to make it 40-30 heading to the fourth.
The final tally for the third quarter ready thusly: Abby Davis 14, Mars Hill 9.
“We wanted [Davis] not to catch it [in the paint] all night,” Mitchell said, “but she’s just a great athlete. Even if you are able to make her not catch it, she’s gonna crash the boards. We tried to key on her, but she’s just a really good athlete.”
In the decisive second and third quarters, when Phil Campbell out-scored the Lady Panthers 28-15, Davis shot 9-for-13 from the floor and totaled 21 points.
“I couldn’t have done it without my teammates feeding me the ball in the middle,” said Davis, who topped the 20-point mark for the sixth time this season and finished with 22 points and 10 rebounds. “The middle was wide open, and they did a great job of seeing the open floor.”
“We focus a lot on getting the ball to the middle,” Thomas chimed in. “When we get the ball to Abby there, she does a good job making decisions.”
Mitchell also mentioned Allen as another focal point for Mars Hill defensively, but the 5’9 guard was still able to put her fingerprints all over Thursday’s win. Allen didn’t grab her first rebound until the final minute of the first half but had 11 boards by night’s end, a handful of which came on the offensive end. She also went 3-for-4 from the line in the fourth quarter and stuffed the stat sheet with 11 points, two assists, three steals and two blocks.
Thomas talked after the game about the steadying influence provided by Allen, a Russellville transfer who was making her first regional appearance on Thursday.
“Kallie settles us down so much. She knows where everybody’s at the whole time,” he said. “She doesn’t get real excited. Last year, when it got close to the end of games, we didn’t have anybody we could go to who could settle us down. She’s done that for us real well this year.”
Aside from the arrival of Allen (who ranks second on the team in scoring at 12.3 points per game and first in threes made with 33), the biggest development that has taken Phil Campbell from a losing record last season to the brink of Birmingham this season is the maturation of Mills, who possesses poise beyond her years. A sportswriter remarked after Thursday’s game that Mills’ expression never seems to change; the freshman certainly seemed unflappable on Hanceville’s big stage, playing major minutes down the stretch after senior forward Chloe Roberson fouled out and finishing 4-for-6 from the line with six rebounds.
At the other end of the spectrum both age-wise and experience-wise is Darby Elliott, who scored all six of her points on Thursday in the final four minutes of the game. The senior guard sealed the deal with a minute to go, running down a long lead pass from Allen and speeding to the basket for a three-point play that made it 54-46 and all but punched Phil Campbell’s ticket to the regional final.
“Darby’s a senior. This is her third trip down here,” Thomas said of Elliott, who reached the 1,000-point mark for her career with a 20-point effort in Monday’s sub-regional rout of Cleveland. “She never shies away from the moment, I’ll say that. She loves to step up.”
Elliott had two assists and two steals to go with her six points, and younger sister Dakota finished with 10 points and six boards. Roberson had two points and also pulled down six rebounds, helping the Lady Bobcats hold a commanding 41-23 edge on the glass.
Phil Campbell shot just 33 percent (18-for-54) from the field and turned the ball over 20 times (compared to 15 by Mars Hill), but the Lady Bobcats made good at the foul line. After shooting just 3-for-8 from the line in the first three quarters, they went 11-for-17 in the fourth.
Next up is Monday’s regional final against Cold Springs, which pulled away from Lamar County 59-41 on Thursday behind 30 points from 5’11 sophomore Elizabeth Hill. The Lady Bobcats beat Cold Springs 67-59 at a Thanksgiving tournament in November. Win the rematch, and the Final Four awaits.
“One game at a time,” Thomas said on Thursday night. “We’ll practice all weekend for the Cold Springs game. We’ve got some film on them, and we know how we match up. I feel like we’ve got some quickness on them. I’m not sure they’re as quick as Mars Hill, so we’d love to run.”
If the Lady Bobcats keep playing well, they can run all the way to Birmingham.