By Robert Niedzwiecki

The Winchester Star

WINCHESTER — Never mind the trite sports expression “emotion can only take you so far.” It took the James Wood High School girls’ basketball team to a 56-point turnaround Tuesday night at Casey Gymnasium.

Playing aggressively from start to finish on senior night, James Wood defeated Handley 55-40 to avenge a 77-36 defeat on Jan. 15.

With the win, the Colonels (6-13, 4-3 Northwestern District) clinched the third seed in the district tournament, and as a result will face the No. 2-seeded Judges (11-7, 5-3) again Friday at 6 p.m. at Millbrook.

“It’s senior night,” said point guard Whitney Dennis, one of six Colonels seniors and the game’s leading scorer with 19 points. “The first time we got beat by like 40, and it was just awful. We weren’t in the game, we weren’t ready for it, and they just demolished us.

“This time, us seniors ... we had to give everything up in our last home game. We had to give it all we had.”

Seniors accounted for 47 of James Wood’s 55 points, with Shannan Thorne (eight points, nine rebounds) the only non-senior scorer. James Wood led for the last 29 minutes and five seconds, and after taking a 28-15 advantage into the half, the Colonels maintained a double-digit lead. At the end of the game, senior guard Heather Armel (12 points, three steals) threw the ball up in the air and started clapping excitedly and hugging teammates, which wouldn’t have happened if she wasn’t throwing her body around at the start.

“This time we came out with intensity,” Armel said. “I believe in the first quarter I felt myself [go] down [to the floor] like eight times. That just kind of set the tempo for the whole game. There wasn’t one ball we didn’t hustle for.

“I think the [lengthy break from basketball because of the recent snow] kind of helped us a little bit. We were all kind of down with our season, and the break gave us time to think about it. I started missing basketball, and a couple weeks ago I was getting sick of it. We just wanted to get out here and play again. I know us seniors wanted to leave our hearts out there, and I think we did.”

Though James Wood said its game Saturday at Skyline helped knock some of the rust off, the Colonels’ effort was vital, because they still weren’t where they needed to be in terms of execution Tuesday. Handley, which hadn’t played since Feb. 2, clearly wasn’t in sync either. (Each team shot 36 percent and the two combined to hit just 20 of 49 free throws.)

The first quarter ended with the teams shooting a combined 9 of 28 from the floor and 1 of 8 from the free throw line. James Wood was the clear winner, though, and not just because it led 11-8. Handley’s Erin Drumheller was out of the game with foul trouble.

“I knew I had to get her out of the game,” said Dennis, who saw Sherando stay with Handley as a result of getting Drumheller in foul trouble in a game she watched earlier this season. “I just kept driving to her and driving to her.”

Dennis was able to draw fouls on a lot of people with her forays to to the basket — she took 14 free throws, making six, to go along with seven field goals — and the Colonels enjoyed the spoils of her effort in the second quarter.

With Drumheller sitting out for the duration, James Wood outscored Handley 17-7, holding the Judges to 2 of 12 shooting while the Colonels made 6 of 13 shots to take a 28-15 halftime lead. James Wood was relentless, with one Thorne basket coming as a result of the Colonels’ fourth offensive rebound of the possession.

Though Drumheller (11 points) played the entire second half, Handley was never able to get back into the game because the Colonels never let up.

As it turned out, Judges coach Marvin Scott could have played Drumheller in the second quarter — an official awarded a foul that the Judges assumed was against Drumheller to someone else, a mistake that wasn’t discovered until halftime — but the bottom line was that Handley didn’t match James Wood’s energy.

“It’s a coach’s nightmare when, at the end of the year, going into tournament play, you see a lack of focus from your team, a lack of intensity,” Scott said. “We got out-hustled. We got out-muscled on the boards. We [committed] quick fouls on their guards. We never got in sync. We panicked. We threw the ball away. We never attacked the basket. We were going sideline to sideline.

“We were waiting for somebody else to do something, but that somebody didn’t appear.”

On the other side, James Wood coach Rhonda Slider’s group of seniors — which also include Tori Eaton (11 points), Brittany Whitacre, Amber Webster and Lauryl Andrus — never went away.

“They knew what they had to do to win this game,” Slider said. “That’s one of the most aggressive games we’ve had here in a while.”

 

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