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Tuesday, January 15, 2008 10:22 AM Area Notebook: Lady Demons heating up at the right time From staff reports Although young and undersized, the Fike girls varsity basketball team isn't making any excuses. Instead, it's just winning games. The Lady Golden Demons (9-6) are hitting their stride at just the right time. Fike tipped off 3-A NEW 6 Conference action last Friday with a 48-37 victory against perennial conference power SouthWest Edgecombe. The win was the fourth straight for the Lady Demons and ended a long drought against SouthWest, the two-time defending conference champs. ZONED IN To compensate for a small lineup, Fike coach John Gay has deployed a variety of zone looks on defense to try and slow down the oppositions offenses this season. "We're going to be outmanned about every time as far as size and matching up goes," Gay said. Fike had success with their defensive strategy against the Lady Cougars, limiting them to just 4-of-28 shooting in the first half to race out to a 28-12 lead by intermission. "We run a different zone, I can't really describe it," Gay said with a wry smile. "It's a 2-3 kind of but we play it a little bit different -- it's kind of a match-up." Whatever it's called, SouthWest's standout junior Monique Williams said it was effective. "We hadn't ever seen nothing like that so it was hard for us to figure out what kind of offense to run against it," said Williams after the loss. BENCH PLAY KEY With foul trouble plaguing the Lady Demons in the second half, Gay turned to his bench and received valuable minutes in the crunch. "We had a lot of players step up off the bench and they didn't let us down," Gay said, citing the play of sophomore Ciara Perry, junior Talaya Hall and freshmen Jameka Thompson and Kelly Sigmon. "We got a little tired and had some people sitting on the bench in foul trouble and they got in there and did a great job," commended Gay. FIKE ESCAPES IN OVERTIME It was a grind-it-out victory for the Golden Demons in Pinetops, but that's the way boys coach George Drawhorn expects games to go now that conference play is under way. Fike (13-2) understands that wins are the bottom line, ugly or not. "Everybody's starting now 0-0 and this is what gets us to the state playoffs," said Drawhorn of the NEW 6 opponents. "That other stuff doesn't matter so it was very important to get this win under our belt. Now we just have to go back and get ready for another hard battle next week." FREE THROWS HINDER COUGARS With only six-tenths of a second left on the clock and the game tied 61-61, SouthWest sophomore William Young stepped to the stripe to try and seal the win for the Cougars in the New 6 opener versus the Golden Demons last Friday. But Young's shot fell short to send the game into overtime where Fike would go on to win 72-67. Young's missed attempt summed up the Cougars' recent struggles from the stripe. SouthWest hit only 12-of-22 foul shots. "Once again we shoot 50 percent from the free-throw line," said SouthWest Edgecombe coach Dudley Etheridge with a shake of his head at his rough estimate of the Cougars' futility. "That's the fifth straight game and it's killed us every time." LADY BRUINS OVERWHELM CBA The Beddingfield girls basketball team showed why it's such a dangerous team in defeating visiting Charles B. Aycock 87-44 on Friday night. The Lady Bruins, the top-ranked 3-A squad in the NCPreps.com poll, reeled off four devastating runs to improve to 15-0 and 1-0 in the Eastern Carolina Conference. Beddingfield started the game on a 16-6 run, followed by runs of 13-3 in the second quarter, 10-2 in the third and 11-3 in the fourth. That's 36 points of the Lady Bruins' eventual 47-point margin of victory. ROLLING THROUGH THE ECC Beddingfield went undefeated in non-conference play for the second time in three years, including the 2005-2006 season when the Lady Bruins won the 3-A state title. But maybe more importantly is what's ahead of Beddingfield, head coach Debra Pegram acknowledged. "It's a new season," she said. "Non-conference is great, but it doesn't mean a thing. We've got to take care of business in the conference, and we've got a competitive, physical conference." With Friday's win, the Lady Bruins have now won 25 straight ECC games, spanning the two-year existence of the realigned conference. QUICK START Beddingfield wasn't going to let the Lady Falcons stick around much longer than was absolutely necessary. The Lady Bruins scored on 15 of their first 22 possessions, with freshman Ansia Dial scoring eight of her team's 15 points. Dial and junior guard Monique Spry tied for a team-high 15 points. "It feels good. I'm a freshman, I'm on varsity and I'm just doing all I can," Dial said. "I'm just trying to make it to Chapel Hill (for the state championship game), trying to win every game I can and do my role. "Coach just told me to take it to them, and that's what I did," she said of the explosive start. "I just kept going, running out secondary break. I just ran and ran and ran." LADY FALCONS COME UP SHY CBA (0-1, 1-14) did pull within seven points, 22-15, midway through the first quarter, scoring on four of five possessions. The only trouble was Beddingfield also only missed on one possession and continued to score on three of its next four possessions, a 7-0 surge, to explode to a 31-15 lead. "We've definitely have learned to have tough skin this season," Lady Falcons head coach Carrie Reynell said. "Like I told the girls, it doesn't matter what we've done in the past games. We're just going to have to work as hard as we can in the conference." Chantel Gaines keyed CBA's early offense, scoring five of the Lady Falcons' first seven baskets and 16 of their 28 first-half points. TURNOVERS THE DIFFERENCE The biggest factor the for CBA boys team, in pulling out its 59-58 win against the Bruins on Friday, was cutting down its turnovers and converting Beddingfield's during the second half. The Golden Falcons committed 12 turnovers in the first half, including seven in the first quarter. Beddingfield had just seven for the half in building a lead that reached as big as nine points. In the second half, CBA committed just seven, while the Bruins committed nine. "We thought if they going to make a run, we wanted them to do it in the first half," Golden Falcons head coach David West said. "We thought if they did make their runs to start with, we'd be able to get ourselves together and come back. "It just worked our that they made a great run in the first half -- they were really spankin' us -- and we finally got who we needed into the game and the guys came back." DAVIS KEYS BEDDINGFIELD Beddingfield's sophomore forward Terry Davis took over the Bruins' offense in the second half, scoring 22 of his game-high 29 points in that span. Only three other Beddingfield players scored in the second half, and only one (Dalton Ford) scored more than two points. During one stretch, Davis scored seven straight baskets for the Bruins (0-1, 1-14), as Beddingfield hung to a six-point lead early in the fourth quarter. "Our guys played hard," Bruins head coach Charles Howard said. "We had a lot of opportunities, but we let a lot of opportunities go by. Some of our bad habits reared their head. "... (Davis) plays hard the entire game, and once everybody brings that energy consistently the entire game, we're going to be a better team. But Terry does his job." A FIRST FOR GURGANUS David Gurganus, who also scored two key baskets in the second quarter, scored a team-high 13 points, but none were more critical than his rebound toss at the buzzer, giving the Golden Falcons (2-13) their first ECC win since the 2005-2006 season. It was the first time the sophomore guard had hit a buzzer-beater like that to win the game. "I made a pass to somebody who made the shot in middle school," Gurganus said, laughing. "But I've never done that before." |
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