West Point girls snap losing skid

December 10, 2011

On any given night, you can find Wilma Davis scoring at least 10-points, most nights its a little more.
Friday, the senior finished with 15 to help stop a three-game losing streak following a 68-51 win over Aberdeen.
Head coach Murray Woody said her confidence has been a little shaken lately, but that hasn’t stopped her leading the team in scoring every night.
“I keep telling her, ‘keep shooting, because shooters go through slumps’,” he said.
If her 15-points was a slump, it was enough to help West Point (5-5) get their first victory in almost two weeks.
Taylor McCarry and Adrianna Billups, who also average double-digits finished with 21 and 11-points respectively. Nekeisha Walker also contributed 11-points.
West Point came out with a little more energy to start the ball game, hungry to get back to .500 on the year. But Aberdeen, Woody said, out hustled them in the first quarter and the two teams were only separated by a field-goal 19-17. West Point eventually settled down and found a rhythm offensively while doing some things on defense to keep the Lady Bulldogs off balance.
The strategy gave them an eight point lead at the half.
The Green Wave kept their foot on the accelerator in the second half, scoring a game-high 20-points in the third quarter to take a 17-point lead into the fourth quarter, allowing most of the starters to take a breather for the night.
“All in all, I was very happy with the way we played,” Woody said. “We did a better job rebounding. I thought the guards did well on the fast breaks and I thought our pressure was really good.”
The younger girls, Woody says are getting a lot more comfortable on the floor as the season wears on.
“They won big in the JV game and that’s given them a little more confidence, it’s just a slow process.”

Boys: Aberdeen 89-42 West Point

Before West Point scored a field goal, Aberdeen had scored 19 unanswered points, including four 3-pointers in the first four minutes on the non-district ball game.
The Green Wave (4-6) couldn’t recover quick enough as they were handed their fourth loss in five games.
West Point head coach Brad Cox knew coming into the game they were going to be good and motivated - assistant coach Joshua Pulphus is an Aberdeen native and former coach and Rico Robinson is a recent transfer from the Bulldogs.
“They came out with a lot of intensity and we didn’t meet that,” he said. “It was the middle of the first quarter before we settled down and by that time we were already down. We dug a big hole early.”
Down 15-0 in the first, West Point’s Cortez Malone blocked what would have been an easy layup after sprinting from end to end and making the big play, to finally stop the bleeding. Daryl Thomas, who finished with 18-points including four 3-pointers finally got West Point on the board with 3:57 to play in the first.
Down by 20-points after one quarter, Aberdeen continued to find the basket and led 55-28 at the half.
“The rest of the game we were playing catch up,” Cox said whose team had cut the defect to 15 at one point before the break. “We had to use so much energy to get to that point that our defense suffered and they were able to run it back up again with easy looks.”
Malone rounded out the top scores with 10-points.