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| Published March 12, 2004 :: Home |
Pullman
Returns to Title Game On the flip side, a first-ever semifinal game for LaCenter — Pullman’s 44-29 victim on Friday — made for a somewhat ugly experience. That’s what happens when seven members of your team spend much of the previous 20 hours sick to their stomach — and all that that entails — and when a first-half collision splits your star player’s lip wide open. Both of those happened to Wildcat junior Tanya Baker, who came back from the latter ... though the Wildcats couldn’t come back from the former against a Pullman team that turned out to be as quick as they were. “It was time to show everybody that we earned what we’ve got right now,” said Greyhound forward Kelli Davis, whose 17 points included seven in the fourth quarter, when Pullman pulled away. “Everybody said we had the easy bracket last year, and that that’s the only reason we got there.” This week, Pullman has beaten a 20-3 Eatonville team, two-time defending champion East Valley and now a 24-1 Wildcat squad that had dominated the Southwest League. “We play in a real tough league,” Pullman coach Mike Davis said. “The Great Northern really tests you every night. That’s a big advantage of playing in the league we play in — our kids understand what it takes to compete every night.” On Friday, Pullman guard Usha Petersen kept the pressure on LaCenter point guard Sarah Davis, harassing her into six turnovers and 2-for-17 shooting. “I think (number) 11 was getting really flustered,” Petersen said. “Early on, our coach said to give them a lot of pressure and they’d get their heads completely out of the game.” It worked as the Greyhounds built leads of 11-3 and 23-17. But when Baker returned — having missed nearly the entire second quarter with the badly bloodied lip — she scored seven points in a 9-3 run that lifted La Center into a 26-26 tie. Her 3-pointer in that run also pushed her over 1,000 points for her career. But even though that run ruffled the Greyhounds — “I was SO nervous,” Petersen said — they settled down as Petersen scored the first four points of a decisive 14-0 run.
“Our girls were just dead tired,” Wildcats coach Herm
Van Weerdhuizen said, noting that few had gotten much sleep over the past 20
hours with the team-wide illness. “I could see it in their legs. They didn’t
have it.”
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