On Wednesday night at Bud Seymour Gymnasium, the Buchholz girls basketball team played with a lead for most of the night.
Buchholz held Eastside without a field goal in the second quarter, built a 15-point lead at the half, and held off the Rams, 41-35, to sweep the two-game series.
“That’s what we try and emphasize the most,” said Buchholz coach Niya Johnson, whose team defeated Eastside, 49-45, on the road on Dec. 12. “Defense wins games. If you play defense, everybody’s in a happy mood…you’ve got to play solid defense, stop swatting, head-to-head straight up, take charges, stop the ball.”
The Rams scored the first basket of the game on a steal and a layup by senior Precious Marshall, but the Bobcats tied it 2-2 on a floater on the right baseline by junior Jamison Cardwell with 6:30 remaining in the first quarter.
The Bobcats took the lead at 4-2 on an over-the-shoulder toss with her back to the basket by junior Kennedy Wyckoff (6 points), and they never trailed again.
Cardwell led the Bobcats on Senior Night with a team-high 16 points, including 12 in the opening half when she single-handedly outscored the Lady Rams.
Buchholz (10-8) also got a huge lift from its bench, which outscored Eastside’s reserves, 15-0.
“That lets you know that, not just our starting five can score but our bench as well,” Johnson said. “We emphasize that. Just come and be ready to play. You never know when your name or your jersey number’s going to be called.”
In the first quarter, Cardwell worked around a pick by senior Kaylynn Perry at the top of the key and drilled a 3-pointer for a 9-4 lead with 3:10 to play in the opening quarter.
Cardwell had the final five points of the second quarter with another top-of-the-key three and a layup for a 23-8 lead at the half as the Bobcats ended the period on a 9-0 run.
“She’s good at what she does, obviously,” Johnson said. “There’s more stuff that she can get better at, but she did have an all-around game. But like I said, there’s more stuff that she can get better at and that’s my focus right now.”
Eastside (12-5) regrouped at the half, as Rams’ head coach Lonna Turner told her team, “We’ve got to go after it, we’ve got to go hard.”
“We’ve got to fight back,” she said. “We fought the last game and we’ve got to show them that we’re not a scared team. We’re going to play. We’re going to give you a game. They came out, my seniors, they know this is their last time playing Buchholz and they wanted to go out and play hard. I said, ‘leave it all on the floor,’ and that’s they came out and did. They left it all out on the floor.”
Marshall scored on a layup just 20 seconds into the second half and a couple of possessions later she knocked down a 3-pointer with 6:54 to play in the third quarter to make it a 10-point game at 23-13.
She scored 18 of her game-high 20 points in the second half, including 13 in the final quarter to keep her team in the game after Buchholz extended the lead back to 15 again in the final period.
“It (her performance) was tremendous,” Turner said. “That’s the Precious that I love to see play. She was relaxed. She felt it, she was in rhythm…I’m just so happy that she shined tonight. She got to feel it, and so she knows down the road when we go into district, that’s the person that I want to show up on those game nights…tonight she wore that C (captain) on her chest proudly.”
Eastside, which has four regular season games left, will continue its tough schedule this week with a game at Raines (Jacksonville) on Thursday, followed by a home game on Saturday against defending 1A state champion Hawthorne.
“These are our battle games,” Turner said. “We have to go in and fight. We can’t lie down. We can’t be a second-half team. We have to come in ready to fight, go hard. Hopefully, we can come out with the win…every team is beatable. We’ve just got to show up and play.”
Buchholz has just one regular season game remaining, at home vs. West Port (Ocala) on Jan. 31, before the 6A-District 2 tournament in less than two weeks. “It (regular season) flew by,” Johnson said. “But we’ve got districts, so all of this doesn’t matter, it just means another season. That’s our main concern at this point.”
