EDMONDS — The competition between the Shorewood and Edmonds-Woodway girls basketball teams couldn’t get much more even.
Earlier in the season the Warriors defeated the Thunderbirds by six points. The Thunderbirds returned the favor Wednesday with a six-point win of their own, defeating Edmonds-Woodway 61-55 in overtime. The win pulled the Thunderbirds (5-4 league, 10-7 overall) even with the Warriors (5-4, 10-7) for third place among 3A teams in the Wesco 3A South, which also includes Shorecrest, a 2A school.
“I don’t spend too much time looking at the postseason numbers, I just try to take it game by game,” Shorewood head coach Mark Haner said after the win. “We’ve looked a little at it and we knew this was a big one because Shorecrest got us on Saturday.”
The Warriors led 7-2 early in the first quarter, but Shorewood junior Jalyn Hizey kept her team in the game. She connected on three 3-pointers in the first quarter, though her team trailed 19-13 heading into the second period thanks to an 8-2 run by Edmonds-Woodway.
Hizey scored six more points in the early moments of the second quarter and helped her team gain its first lead since it led 2-0 in the first quarter with her fourth 3-pointer of the game. Shorewood’s 16-4 run to start the quarter quickly turned a six-point deficit into a six-point lead.
The Thunderbirds never trailed again and Hizey finished with a game-high 22 points.
“Jalyn has been playing really, really well for us lately,” Haner said. “I think Woodway really tried to focus on taking away Taryn (Shelley) and Lily (Gustafson) and I think Jalyn did a great job of taking advantage of that and putting up the outside shots. Our frontcourt is a real problem for a lot of people and Jalyn is a fantastic shooter. Any given night she can really, really go off.”
Hizey’s 15-point first half caused the Warriors to switch to a box-and-one defense in the second half, but that only seemed to open up the game for her teammates.
“Since they were trying so hard to take away me, it helped when they were basically doubling me and it left another player open,” Hizey said. “My teammates did a really good job of knocking down shots.”
Gustafson and Shelley combined to score six points in the first half, but had 18 combined after halftime.
“We went on a nice run to start (the third quarter) there and it was mostly because they were focusing hard on (Jalyn),” Haner said. “It’s hard to guard us in general, but especially with a frontcourt like that it’s hard to guard 4-on-4. You just can’t afford to help anywhere. We took advantage of that.”
Shorewood led by as many as nine in the third quarter, but Edmonds-Woodway cut the deficit to three going into the fourth.
Shorewood led throughout the fourth quarter, but Missy Peterson’s 3-pointer with 55 seconds remaining tied the game at 50 and eventually forced overtime.
The extra stanza belonged to Shorewood, which didn’t allow Edmonds-Woodway to score until there were 22 seconds to go and the outcome was no longer in doubt.
“We just started hitting a few of the shots that we had been taking and made sure we took care of the ball,” Haner said. “The first possession of overtime we took three really good shots, but we just happened to miss them all. We got the ball back in to Lily on the next possession and she scored. Seeing the lid come off on that one did a lot for us. A team like Woodway, they’re going to make some shots and we got them to miss their first few and that’s huge too.”
At Edmonds-Woodway H.S.
Shorewood 13 18 12 7 11 —61
Ed.-Woodway 19 9 12 10 5 —55
Shorewood—Jalyn Hizey 22, Abby Gustafson 0, Dakota Laut 3, Kaitlyn Amundesen 4, Lily Gustafson 13, Katie Taylor 5, Taryn Shelley 11, Jasmine Pollard 3. Edmonds-Woodway—Isabel Callen 0, Ally Burdett 0, Mady Burdett 19, Marivel Ortega 6, Maddie Tudor 6, Adrienne Poling 2, Courtney Simpson 2, Missy Peterson 20. Records—Shorewood 5-4 league, 10-7 overall. Edmonds-Woodway 5-4, 10-7.
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