EDMONDS — It wasn’t pretty, but the end result of Friday’s Wesco 3A South girls basketball game between Lynnwood and Edmonds-Woodway was the same as the Royals previous 10 games so far this season — a convincing victory.
The No. 2-ranked Royals recovered from an early 10-0 deficit to defeat the Warriors 56-29 and stay undefeated.
“It’s great for us to be challenged,” Lynnwood head coach Everett Edwards said. “It’s great to face adversity. We started down 10-0 and it’s happened before. It’s a situation where we didn’t panic. If anything, we kind of stepped up at that point to play a little bit harder and we were able to get the deficit back to being even again and then we started playing basketball.”
Even after falling behind by 10, Edwards didn’t call a timeout, instead electing to let his team make the adjustments on the floor.
“I value my timeouts and I’d rather try to have us hopefully work it out,” Edwards said. “Had it gone to 12-0, I might have called a timeout then, but we’ve been down that road before. We’ve been in situations playing against Arlington and Edmonds-Woodway and all these great offensive teams where it’s a struggle at the start, but thankfully a game is going to be 32 minutes and we try not to get to overly excited in the first three or four minutes.”
Lynnwood countered the Warriors 10-0 run to start the game with an 11-0 run of its own. Edmonds-Woodway senior Maddie Tudor scored with 46 seconds to play in the first quarter to give her team the lead after one quarter.
The Warriors would lead only one more time in the early moments of the second quarter.
Oregon State commit Mikayla Pivec finished with 19 points, but the Warriors’ 2-3 zone made it difficult for her to find her usual rhythm.
“She likes to go left, so if you take away that left, and we knew we had to box her out to stop those second-chance points she usually gets,” Edmonds-Woodway head coach Rebekah Wells said. “We were able to stop her in transition, which is huge. She usually gets a lot of free throws and she only had two today. It’s a combination of making sure that you take away those transition points and a half-court set we just knew where she was and we were able to get those rebounds a little bit more.”
Juniors Kelsey Rogers and Kaprice Boston stepped up to provided secondary scoring for the Royals, finishing with 14 and nine points respectively.
“We’re going to have to have other kids hit shots,” Edwards said. “That’s something that we take a lot of pride in. We take pride in the fact that we have a great team. Hopefully when teams are playing Mikayla extra attention we’ll be able to make the right adjustments to get kids shots that they can make. We promote that in practice and we promote it during the games.”
Defensively, the Warriors had a lot to be proud of. The 56 points the Royals finished with are the second fewest they’ve scored all season.
But the Warriors couldn’t score enough points to stay in the game – in large part due to the Royals’ smothering defensive pressure.
“Offense comes and goes,” Edwards said. “Some nights the ball goes in for you and some nights it doesn’t, but you can play defense every night. We’ve taken pride in that for a very long time. We know if we can keep certain teams’ scores to a certain point that we’re going to be in the game. Whether we have enough points to win it or not, who knows, but we’re going to at least be in the game.”
At Edmonds-Woodway H.S.
Lynnwood 11 16 19 10 —56
Ed.-Woodway 12 5 7 5 —29
Lynnwood—Abi Yemane 0, Reilly Walsh 2, Rachel Walsh 3, Jordyn Edwards 5, Mikayla Pivec 19, Kelsey Rogers 14, Valerie Bell 0, Kaprice Boston 9, Taylor Fahey 4, Abby Douglas 0, Kaui Piilani 0. Edmonds-Woodway—Isabel Callen 0, Ally Burdett 0, Mady Burdett 4, Marivel Ortega 2, Ingrid Fosberg 0, Maddie Tudor 9, Adrienne Poling 3, Emma Dickenson 0, Ellie Shull 0, Courtney Simpson 4, Missy Peterson 7. Records—Lynnwood 11-0. Edmonds-Woodway 8-4.
Aaron Lommers covers prep sports for The Herald. Follow him on Twitter at @aaronlommers and contact him at alommers@heraldnet.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
