Alton Uses Late Run To Beat Tigers And Win 19th Straight

Edwardsville Tigers at Alton Girls Basketball

ALTON – Past the halfway point in their Southwestern Conference schedule, the Alton Redbirds hosted their natural rivals Edwardsville Thursday night.

Alton beat the Tigers at their place on Dec. 5 in a low-scoring game 41-24. That game was dominated by Alton’s Jarius Powers who put up 18 points.

Edwardsville put up a fight during the second go-around in Alton, but a late run from the Redbirds sealed a 48-35 win.

Alton improved to 19-1 on the season and 7-0 in the SWC. The Tigers fall to 9-7 overall and 4-3 in the conference.

From the get-go, the Tigers came out hungry to play.

Alandyn Simmons put up the game’s first basket before Alton’s Kiyoko Proctor drilled a go-ahead three-pointer to go along with Kaylea Lacey’s layup. The Redbirds led 13-7 after the first quarter.

The Tigers then opened up the second quarter with four straight baskets, three from Mia Semith and the other from Simmons. It flipped the script and grabbed Edwardsville the lead at 15-13.

Madeline Ducey knocked down a triple on the other end of the court and Lacey scored another basket to make it 18-15 Alton. Lainey McFarlin’s three-pointer tied the game at 18 before baskets from Lacey and Talia Norman put the Redbirds ahead 22-18 at halftime.

In the two’s first meeting, the game was tied 10-10 at halftime but Alton used an 11-1 run in the third quarter to go on to the win.

Gabby Cook opened the second half with a basket to make it a one-possession game, but then Alton went on a 7-0 run to increase the lead back to 29-20. Kiyoko Proctor nailed a three-pointer, Norman sank two free throws, and Jarius Powers made a basket, forcing the Tigers into a timeout.

Out of the break, the Tigers went on a 9-2 run to get it back to 32-30 before Proctor hit a buzzer-beater triple putting an abrupt end to Edwardsville’s momentum.

Alton held the Tigers to five points in the fourth quarter while they themselves closed the game on an 11-point run to win 48-35.

Despite the win, Alton head coach Deserea Howard wasn’t exactly thrilled with the way her team played. She delivered a message to her team postgame.

“It was just hey, we’ve got to reload, we’ve got to lock in, we’ve got to not underestimate anybody,” she said. “There’s a target on our back and we have to act like it at all times.”

That’s true. When you’re on a 19-game win streak, people are going to bring you their best game. It’s something Howard talks about all the time.

“I don’t even know if it’s surface, but it’s when you play big games, when you’re on a run, it’s hard to stay hungry,” she said. “And that can’t be. I can tell from the way we played tonight that we’re better. No shade to [Edwardsville], they played well, they executed their plan, but we never took control of the game and that’s not how we play. It’s not acceptable knowing that every team that steps in this gym, wants to take us down and that we have to play a certain way for 32 minutes,” Howard said.

On the flip side was an Edwardsville team that came into the game thinking they could win. Unlike the first time the teams met.

“Belief. Confidence. Our kids came in believing they could win and that’s what we’ve been preaching to them,” Edwardsville head coach Bryan Young said. “I thought we competed a lot harder. I tell the girls there’s one thing playing hard but there’s another thing to compete.”

“I thought tonight we competed really hard and believed we could win,” Young said.

The Tigers especially felt that way when they were making a run for it in the third quarter, all to have that work outshined by Proctor’s buzzer-beater.

“That’s why she’s the heart and soul of that team,” Young said of Proctor. “She keeps her poise, never gets high, never gets low. I was trying to take her away and not let her get it, but she got the ball, drove down, and made a huge shot. That was huge.”

That shot set up the fourth quarter in which Alton pulled away but was never comfortable until Ducey’s clutch triple made it 41-35 with just under five minutes to play.

“I feel like Ducey’s three was huge,” Howard said. “I feel like that was the one where I finally let my breath go. Because it was other people. You expect your star players to do certain things. When you have other people stepping up all around, that’s the big stuff.”

“So, that three, the confidence it took to take that three, and then to nail it, I feel like everybody was like, okay, we got this now,” Howard said.

It felt like the Tigers had just run out of gas in the fourth, but Young said that wasn’t the case.

“I don’t know if we ran out of gas, they just have been in those contests, so they know how to keep their poise and make the right plays,” he said. “They don’t panic. That’s four years of experience with those girls and I think it showed tonight.”

Alton improves to 7-0 in the conference, a game ahead of O’Fallon who is 6-1. Belleville East and Edwardsville are both 4-3 in the conference. In two other SWC games on Thursday night, O’Fallon beat Belleville West 63-14 and Belleville East beat Collinsville 69-30.

But it was another low-scoring game for Alton as it was held to below 50 points of scoring for just the fifth time this season. Three of those games were conference.

Through seven SWC games now, Alton is averaging 54.6 points per game. Compare that to 66.8 PPG throughout their other 12 non-conference wins.

“I think with conference, you play teams so much and coaches begin to start to know each other,” Howard explained. “We know each other’s tactics and tendencies. So, I can kind of know what he’s going to do, and he knows what I’m going to do. It’s different when you travel, and you see people once or twice.”

Proctor led Alton with 14 points while Lacey added 10. Norman scored nine points, Powers had seven, and Ducey scored six.

The Redbirds take on a tough Cardinal Ritter team at Harris-Stowe State University in St. Louis this Saturday at 4 p.m.

The Tigers were led by Semith with 10 points and Kaylee Hauschild with eight. Simmons scored six points, Cook had five, and Sophie Shapiro and McFarlin each had three.

The Tigers open up the Highland tournament on Saturday against Chatham Glenwood at 11:30 a.m., and they head into it with some confidence in the way they played against Alton.

“I love the way we played,” Young said. “I told the girls, we didn’t win, but I was proud of the way they competed. We’ve got to find a way to flip that script and get a W against a good team.”