WINTHROP — The Winthrop Ramblers had to believe it was their night after Kena Souza banked not one but two 3-pointers in the opening minutes of Wednesday night’s MVC girls’ basketball game against Spruce Mountain.
But the Ramblers had already established by that point that they weren’t just going to rely on good bounces to beat the Phoenix. They outworked their guests, too, particularly on the boards, and made a lot of their own luck.
Winthrop roared out to a 10-0 lead, then snuffed out a run by Spruce Mountain early in the fourth quarter to pull out a 59-47 win.
Aaliyah WilsonFalcone finished with 17 points and 15 rebounds to lead the Ramblers (10-1). Souza and Jillian Schmelzer added nine points apiece.
Haley Turcotte led the Phoenix (7-5) with 17 points, while Julianne Doiron added 13 points.
Winthrop came out the aggressor from the opening tap, crashing the offensive glass to get second-chance points from WilsonFalcone and Souza, whose second banked trey made it 13-6 Ramblers.
“We’re not the tallest team in the league,” Winthrop coach Joe Burnham said, “but we’ve got some girls that go up and get the ball at their highest point, which is not something you see all the time in girls’ basketball. We feel like that gives us an advantage. Aaliyah’s one of our shortest players, but she doesn’t let that stop her at all.”
In addition to the 5-foot-4 WilsonFalcone, who had three offensive rebounds, Schmelzer (five rebounds), Katie Perkins (seven rebounds) and Layne Audet (seven rebounds) made notable contributions on the glass.
“It gets the momentum going,” WilsonFalcone said. “The more aggressive we are, the more our teamwork flows. It just gets everything going.”
“(Winthrop) came out expecting to win, and we came out wondering if we could win,” Spruce Mountain coach Zach Keene said. “They came out a lot more confident, a lot more aggressive. That was the difference, really.”
The Phoenix cut the quick 10-point deficit in half by the end of the first quarter but continued to get outworked by Winthrop at both ends and trailed 27-16 at the half.
One reason the Phoenix never got on track was the work done by Perkins defending Turcotte, one of the top scorers in the MVC who set a school record earlier this year with 42 points in a single game. Perkins limited the senior guard to four first-half points.
“I just tried to keep as little space between me and her as possible,” Perkins said, “because I knew if she had a foot of space she would shoot it from anywhere. I feel like as a team we worked really hard. They were calling out the screens and calling out what was going on to help me out and help our team out.”
“Boy, I don’t think we could have asked (Perkins) to do much more,” Burnham said. “Turcotte’s a special player. She’s going to score her points. But that’s the type of leadership mentality (Perkins) brings to this team. She came out at one point with a bloody mouth, rinsed it out with water and said, ‘Coach, I’m ready to go back in.’”
Winthrop upped its lead to 13 points, 40-27, at the end of the third, so Spruce Mountain dialed up the full-court pressure and started the fourth with with a 7-0 run. A putback for a three-point play by Doiron and a Turcotte 3-pointer pulled the Phoenix within 40-34 and prompted a time out by Burnham.
“We just needed to calm down and move the ball like we do in practice,” Perkins said. “Once we got it figured out, we did pretty well.”
“We were all rushing because I think we realized they were closing in,” WilsonFalcone said. “We kind of panicked a little bit and the time out was to just get us to settle down and make sure we could get back in our own heads.”
Winthrop gave up nine turnovers in the quarter, but Spruce couldn’t get any closer.
Back-to-back layups by WilsonFalcone and Schmelzer braced the Ramblers for Turcotte’s second trey of the period that made it 44-37 Ramblers with 5:20 left. Another hoop by WilsonFalcone and 3-pointer by Souza inflated the cushion back to double digits to stay with 3:42 to go.
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