Smith leads Russellville to blowout win over Red Bay

The Russellville High School varsity girls’ basketball team picked up its second win of the season at Red Bay High School on Monday night, defeating the Lady Tigers 66-27 to improve to 2-2 on the young season.

Coming off a home defeat to Deshler Friday night, the Lady Golden Tigers were able to rebound from that loss behind 20 points from Angeleah Smith. Successfully applying pressure and forcing turnovers, Russellville pulled away from Red Bay after the first period to secure their first road victory of the 2024 campaign.

“Angeleah coming off the bench provided a lot of scoring. She was able to get her three-point shot going,” Russellville head coach Jermaine Groce said.

“What we wanted to see tonight, really, is if we could generate a lot of transition points with our defense, and it looks like we were able to do it,” Groce added.

While Smith’s 20 points off the bench led all scorers in the contest, nearly a dozen different Lady Golden Tigers got to the rim during the game. Laila Hill added 12 points and Sadie Odom tacked on six more, while eight others scored at least one basket.

Groce said he was happy with the many contributions he saw from his players against the Lady Tigers, and it’s something he’d like to see continue going forward.

“Laila played well around the basket, Alexia Groce and Jemma Moore were attacking the rim and kicking out a lot, Sadie Odom initiating the fast break—if those girls continue to do the same thing over and over then we’ve probably got a pretty decent chance of competing in the area and advancing to the sub-regional,” Groce said. 

The rout of Red Bay will give Russellville a bit of momentum as it enters a spell of tough games. The Lady Golden Tigers travel to Belgreen on Tuesday before taking on Austin and Brooks next week after the holiday break. Groce said he will push his team to take a similar approach in those games as it did against Red Bay.

“We’ve got Belgreen (Tuesday), and it’s going to be a tougher team,” he said. “They’ve got a lot of senior and junior leadership, so I’d like to take the aggressiveness from tonight and the defense and take it on the road (at Belgreen) and see if we can generate something.

“After Thanksgiving we’ve got a couple of decent games. We play Austin right after Thanksgiving, so I’d like to give our defense a little bit more of a challenge (against Belgreen) by running a couple more pressure packages and seeing what we can do,” he added.