Different directions

Published 11:58 pm Saturday, January 14, 2012

Northwest Whitfield’s two varsity basketball games had roughly the same storyline Saturday: A team that started off strong, stretched a halftime lead in a pivotal third quarter and then held the other team off to take a crucial Region 7-4A victory in Tunnel Hill.

However, Northwest’s boys and girls teams were on opposite ends of a victory in their meeting with Lambert.

The Bruins won for the first time since dropping four straight region games to start the new year, turning an 11-point halftime advantage into a 16-point lead headed into the fourth and rolling to a 62-48 victory over the Longhorns.

For the Lady Bruins, a promising opening turned into a bitter run at the end of the first half and became disastrous in the third quarter as Northwest trailed by as many as 20 points before falling 62-52 to the Lady Longhorns.

The Northwest boys and both Lambert teams all saw their records finish the day at 11-6, while the Lady Bruins fell to 10-8, but the region records were the most important.

The Bruins remained in the upper half of the 7-4A race with a 4-3 mark and will have six days off before hosting a Rome team without a region victory on Friday. The Longhorns (2-5) needed a win to edge closer to .500, while the Lambert girls stayed firmly entrenched in the upper echelon of the region at 5-2. Northwest’s girls are stuck in the middle of the pack at 3-4.

The Lady Bruins’ performance was frustrating for first-year coach Greg Brown, whose team led 24-18 with six minutes left in the second quarter but scored just four points from there to the locker room. Meanwhile, Lambert hit its stride during that stretch, outscoring Northwest 15-4 to lead by five at the break.

“I want to say the last few minutes of the second quarter we just couldn’t do anything,” Brown said. “And then we didn’t come out of the locker room with the right mindset.

“We had two great looks at the basket early in the second half, and we didn’t finish, and it just sort of steamrolled from there,” he said.

That steamroller effect turned a 33-28 halftime lead for Lambert into  a 43-28 advantage. Northwest didn’t score a basket in the second half until Mackenzie Mastin finally hit a bucket with 1:01 left in the third, and the Lady Longhorns scored the next seven points for their biggest advantage of the night, 50-30.

The Lady Bruins chipped away at the lead in the fourth quarter, getting it back to single digits, but the damage had been done. The key came in the play of the Northwest defense — particularly a press that the Lady Bruins weren’t able to effectively implement in the second and third quarters.

“We set our press off of when we score, and if we aren’t scoring, we can’t get into it,” Brown said. “We are just not as consistent as we need to be for 32 minutes to beat a team of the quality of Lambert. We are not taking advantage and making the right plays at the right time. We have to find somebody to step up and take control of the team.”

Lambert got the bulk of its scoring from Christian Johnson, for whom Northwest never could find an answer. She finished with 27 points, taking advantage of her trips to the free-throw line by hitting 10 of 14 attempts.

Lady Bruins post Carley Fetzer led the team with 10 points, while Marissa Fraire and Taylor Baker each had nine.

In the boys game, the third quarter was a different story for the Bruins, who saw their lead cut to 35-28 after a Lambert 3-pointer, but Northwest responded.

“I learned something big about my team tonight,” Northwest coach Ryan Richards said. “We were in a timeout in that third quarter and we had the lead, and the boys just kept saying, ‘Keep playing to win.’ They knew they had to keep playing hard and be aggressive. That is the identity of this team.”

The Bruins certainly responded. Over the final 4:00 of the third quarter, Northwest held the Longhorns to just three points while going on a 12-3 run that was highlighted by a three-point play from Colter Creswell and a deep 3-pointer from Tanner Quarles, who had four in the game.

Lambert knocked the lead back to eight points in the fourth before Northwest really put the game away.

Back-to-back Longhorn 3-pointers cut Northwest’s lead to 47-39, and that seemed to get Tallon Trew’s attention. Trew, who finished with 25 points, 15 rebounds and four blocks, scored seven of the next nine points as the Bruins stretched the lead back out.

Quarles added 12 points, while Tyler Baker finished with 10. Lambert was led by Colin Perzella’s 14 points.

Northwest will face Rome, Johns Creek and Sequoyah — three teams with four combined region victories coming into Saturday — in its next three games. The win over Lambert could be the spark to get the Bruins back in the race.

“We have a stretch of games coming up where, if we play like we did today, we will be in pretty good shape,” Richards said.