BELLEVUE
The Snohomish girls basketball team doesn’t enjoy running unfamiliar defenses.
Then again, if the defense actually limits Jackson stars Ashly Bruns and Kristi Kingma, then the Panthers are all for it.
On Dec. 8, that defense was a triangle-and-two. And it helped Snohomish post a 54-49 win against Jackson at the Les Schwab Hoop Challenge at Bellevue Community College.
Against a zone, Jackson scored 20 first-period points and grabbed a seven-point lead. From there on out, Snohomish went to a triangle-and-two and methodically took the game over.
“When you’re facing players like Bruns and Kingma, you have to do something to slow them down when they’re shooting like that,” Panthers post Katie Benson said. “We’re not real used to it, but we just had to make the adjustments.”
Benson scored a team-high 19 points and was efficient in doing so, going 6-for-8 from the field. Against the triangle-and-two, Kingma still poured in a game-high 25 points, yet needed 21 field-goal attempts to get there. Bruns was held to eight points.
“I thought our kids executed the defense really well,” Snohomish head coach Ken Roberts said. “We had a few break downs, but it made their scorers really have to work to get shots. We’re long, so it’s not a soft triangle that we’re running.”
Jackson appeared to be headed to a runaway after one quarter. The Timberwolves hit eight field goals in the period ¿ two from 3-point range ¿ and scored 20 points to grab a seven-point lead.
Snohomish’s switch, however, changed the game instantly. Jackson didn’t score a single point the first six minutes of the second quarter. A pair of tough field goals by Kingma allowed the Timberwolves to still have a 29-22 halftime lead, but it didn’t last long. Snohomish rallied for an 11-0 run in the third period and ended the quarter with a layup from Shante Scott to take a 37-36 lead.
Benson had six points during the third quarter and then really took over in the fourth. She hit a jumper and a pair of free throws to make it a 42-38 Snohomish lead, then dropped in two more from the free-throw line with 1:54 left to make it 51-42.
Kingma, who missed two minutes of action early in the fourth quarter because she had four fouls, scored seven points down the stretch. But the gap had widened too far by that point.
“This means a lot,” Roberts said of the win. “We’ve struggled with our confidence a little bit. We lost to Meadowdale earlier and it would’ve been tough on us to lose another close one. Being able to beat a good team makes us feel better about ourselves.”
Benson said the turnaround after the first quarter wasn’t all about the switch in defensive strategy. It also had to do with a change in defensive intensity.
“We just decided to play with a little more fire and make big plays,” she said. “We got some good stops off turnovers and charges and it turned it around. It may have taken a little while, but we just had to wade through the storm.”
Allison Burns also scored in double figures for Snohomish with 10, while Margie Heard finished with nine.
Ryan Piersol writes for The Herald in Everett.
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