The two local high school’s girls junior high school basketball teams met on Tuesday afternoon at the Bellwood-Antis Middle School gym.
Bellwood-Antis held on at the end to claim a 26-25 triumph in overtime, in a closely contested battle over their backyard rivals to the north. Tyrone had three last-minute shots fall just short in the final seconds.
Brittany Webb and Ashley McAlevy led the Lady Blue Devils with eight points each. Webb was especially instrumental in securing the win, just the second in 19 games for the inexperienced Lady Blue Devils, putting Bellwood-Antis into the lead by sinking a pair of free throws with 40 seconds left to play.
For Tyrone, who drops to 4-12, Tifanny Bradford led the way with a game-high 14 points and 12 rebounds and Stefani Bryan had six points and Kayla Corle had four points. Carlee Roth contributed nine rebounds.
Neither school had a good day at the foul line, despite Webb’s game winning efforts. The Tyrone girls shot just eight of 33 from the charity line and Bellwood-Antis didn’t do much better with eight for 24.
“Bellwood played a lot harder in the first half than we did,” acknowledged Tyrone coach Kerry Naylor. Bellw-Antis ran a 1-3-1 trap and although it didn’t get points for them, it made our girls feel uncomfortable with two people guarding them all the time. Give Steve (Conlon) and Chris (Walker), the Bellwood coaches a lot of credit. For them to get their girls to work so hard even though they were 1-19, they did a really good job with their team. We didn’t come out and play as hrad as we should have. I have told the girls in junior high basketball, you can win at least half your games, just bygoing out and playing hard all game long. We didn’t do that.”
The Tyrone girls dominated Bellwood-Antis in the seventh/eighth grade game defeating the Lady Blue Devils 19-2 to improve to 10-6-2.
Stefani Bryan scored six points and Brooke Garbinsky had five points, two assists and two steals.
“Brooke really sparks the other girls,” said coach Naylor. “The way she plays is contagious-it makes everyone around her play better. This team has been playing really good defense. We wanted to do better than last year and they had nine wins, so we accomplished our goal.”
Tyrone is back in action today when the Lady Eagles travel to Huntingdon to complete their season. Gametime is 4 p.m. Bellwood-Antis will travel to Bishop Guilfoyle on Wednesday to conclude their season, with a 6 p.m. start time.
