NORTH ANSON — In 12 games this season, the Winthrop girls basketball team has featured six different leading scorers. With defense like the Ramblers played Friday night, the offense hardly matters anyway.
Aaliyah WilsonFalcone scored a game-high 14 points and Winthrop forced host Carrabec into 31 turnovers en route to a 48-34 win over the Cobras in a Mountain Valley Conference inside the Cobra Dome. The Ramblers improved to 11-1 on the season, shooting better than 41 percent from the floor as a team en route to their third straight win.
“We work as a team,” WilsonFalcone said. “We move as a team, we make sure we’re there, we ask for help when we need it. We just work together.”
Carrabec (7-5) went long stretches without points, including 7:45 in the first half as Winthrop opened up an early 14-8 lead and two spans of nearly four minutes each in the second half.
That allowed the Ramblers to build turn a six-point lead in the first minute of the second half into a 38-24 lead with under two minutes remaining in the third quarter.
“We did some really nice things on defense,” Winthrop coach Joe Burnham said. “Our defense forces them to play our pace instead of playing the game at their pace. That’s always the goal.
“We don’t run a lot of traps out of our full-court defense. It really is, ‘Can you beat us for 84 feet and can you play this pace for 32 minutes?’”
The Cobras could not on Friday night. They never looked settled offensively, struggling mightily against Winthrop’s full-court press and relentless ball-hunting in the half-court set.
Carrabec connected on only 14 of 46 field goal attempts in the game (30.4 percent). Cheyenne Cahill scored 14 points in the defeat, the only Cobra to finish with more than seven points.
“They’re quick,” Carrabec coach Skip Rugh said. “They’re really fast. We did not execute our press breaker the way we’re supposed to. I think that just comes from not playing that level of competition often enough.”
Kena Souza scored 11 points for Winthrop, while Jillian Schmelzer and Madison Forgue each finished with nine.
The Ramblers, who made 19 of 46 attempts in all, spread the offense around leaving Carrabec unable to focus on shutting down any one part of the game.
“That was our plan from the beginning, to play at our pace and do what we do best,” WilsonFalcone said. “Our coach told us that if we move the ball the way we can, and play at our pace, no team can touch us.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
