Posted: December 10, 2012
By GREG BRILL
Special to The Winchester Star

WINCHESTER — James Wood girls’ basketball coach Rhonda Slider doesn’t want to hear about how young her team is.

She knows it got kind of ugly at times against Clarke County on Saturday, with her team guilty of 12 turnovers in one period and 15 in another. But the only thing that mattered to Slider at the end of the day was the way her team fought through the rough play and scrambled in the fourth quarter to rally for a 52-51 non-district win over the Eagles at Donald H. Shirley Gymnasium.

The Colonels (3-2) did not have a senior in the lineup and the ball-handling and decision making (36 turnovers) left plenty of questions still left to be answered in the young season. Afterward, Slider was in no mood for excuses about youth on her roster. She was just glad her players kept competing through the tough times and found a way to win against the previously unbeaten Eagles (4-1).

“You know, we’ve heard ‘young team’ all around the [Northwestern] district this year,” Slider said. “It’s not that I don’t buy into it. There’s teams that are young. I feel like we have, probably, girls that are experienced, and they should know [taking care of the ball] is important. Whether you’re a young freshman or you’re a sophomore, junior, or senior, you can’t turn the ball over. You’re a ballplayer and you take what you can and learn from it and get better.”
A win seemed almost unlikely for James Wood after it fell behind by 12 points in the third period and went on a stretch of almost eight minutes, bridging the second and third periods, without scoring.

But several sources stepped up in the fourth quarter for the Colonels when it was needed most. An 11-3 by James Wood to begin the period wiped out a five-point lead Clarke County had taken to the fourth quarter. Freshman guard Keiana Brooks scored seven points during the run, and Laura Seymour (team-high 14 points) hit a pull-up in transition to make it 42-39 James Wood with 3:49 left.

From there, the Colonels continued to get clutch shooting across the board. They never relinqueshed the lead by getting to the basket and either scoring or going to the line.

Morgan Duncan (7 of 8 in the win) made four straight free throws in the final three minutes, and junior guard Brooke Nesselrodt had a key drive and-one to help keep Clarke County at bay.

A free throw from Nesselrodt (10 points, all in the second half) with four seconds left made for a four-point margin and clinched the win, and a 3-point runner by the Eagles’ Sydney Chrane at the buzzer made for the final one-point margin.

“We were just really determined to win,” Nesselrodt said. “We just wanted to go out there and prove that we’re a better team than what everybody else [believes] we can be.”

The Colonels, coming off a 20-point loss at Musselman (W.Va.) on Thursday, countered all their turnover difficulties by forcing Clarke County into a high number of giveaways (25, including 15 in the second half) and using different scorers throughout the game to end up with a good balance at the end.

While Seymour kept her team in the game in the first half, with 12 of her 14 points leaving the Colonels down only 21-20 at the break, and Brooks (10 points) and Nesslerodt scoring all of their points in the second half, James Wood still had a chance late and came away with a win.

“I was really happy with our play in this game compared to how the last four games went,” Slider said. “We haven’t been able to gel as a team and do the things we’ve wanted to do. We still have some work to do, obviously. All the turnovers, that’s something we still need to work on. But we had four girls [Whitney Dick scored nine points] close to [double-digit] scoring, so we had a balanced attack.

“Our [main] goal was to keep their No. 1 scorer [Chrane] from scoring, and I think our girls did a great job with that.”

Though Chrane was held to 14 points, she did have to sit for extended minutes throughout the game with foul trouble. Chrane picked up her third foul with 3:58 left in the second quarter and sat out the rest of the first half. She got her fourth at the 3:41 mark of the third and did not return until the start of the fourth quarter.

Chrane had scored on a dump-down and-one with 7:24 left in the second quarter, putting her at eight points at the time. Her next points did not come until she had another three-point play with 3:14 left to play in the game.

The Eagles could not use their size as well as they would have liked because fellow post Anna Blue Catlett (nine points) also struggled with fouls and eventually picked up her fifth and left for good with 2:59 left to play and the Eagles down by two points at the time.

Like James Wood, Clarke County had all kinds of issues with turnovers. But when the Eagles were able to force a rash of turnovers (James Wood had seven turnovers before it took its first shot in the third quarter), they had trouble finishing on the other end.

“We didn’t handle adversity very well,” Clarke County coach Tim Lawrence said. “We didn’t close it out like we should have. We had our opportunities, but we just didn’t take advantage of them. Way too many turnovers, way too many missed shots.”

The Eagles had ripped up their first four opponents of the season, winning by an average margin of 30 points.

“I think because we finally were in a close game that we just didn’t handle the pressure or the adversity very well,” Lawrence said. “Honestly, we’ve just got to do a better job of that.”

Ravenscoft was the only other Clarke County player in double-digit scoring, finishing with 10. Chrane had 10 rebounds to lead the Eagles, who were even (36-36) with the Colonels (who got a game-high 14 rebounds from Duncan) off the boards.