After West Hall power forward Kaelyn Gattis knocked down a short jumper to cut the Lakeview Academy girls’ lead to two points, the Lady Spartans (0-1) forced a turnover to give themselves a shot to win the game with just under eight seconds left on the clock.
After a strong defensive stand forced an errant shot with three seconds left, however, the Lady Lions were able to take possession and escape their first game with a 45-43 win in Gainesville.
Led by the hot shooting of junior Taylor Handte, Lakeview Academy (1-0) was able to overcome mistakes in other areas to avoid blowing a lead that had stretched to 12 points at the end of the third quarter.
“Good shooting makes up for a multitude of sins,” Lakeview coach John Carrick said after the game. “We weren’t really playing good, the ball was just going in the hole. We still weren’t blocking out, we still weren’t getting rebounds, we still were doing a lot of stuff that we shouldn’t do.
“I’m overjoyed that we won, but very disappointed that we didn’t play as well as we did in our scrimmage.”
Handte led the team with 18 points in the game, scoring 12 on four 3 pointers. She made two outside the arc in a two-minute span in the third quarter that helped the Lady Lions extend a single-digit lead to 12 points by the end of the quarter.
“I was just feeling it,” Handte said. “I wanted them to keep giving it to me, but I couldn’t have done well without the rest of the girls on the team, too.”
West Hall coach Lynn Jarrett put it simply when speaking about Handte’s play.
“Every time we made a run, she made a three,” she said.
Lakeview was helped by 10 West Hall turnovers in the third quarter, including five on consecutive possessions.
But a strong effort in the final quarter closed the gap in a hurry.
Gattis scored 13 of her team-high 18 points in the fourth quarter, including a three-point play on West Hall’s first possession. Fighting hard to the basket, she laid the ball in and went to the line after Lakeview’s Mona Abraham fouled her. The foul was Abraham’s fifth, and sent her to the bench less than a minute into the quarter.
The possession set the tone for the rest of the quarter in which the Lady Spartans fed the ball to Gattis as much as possible.
“I gave (our team) a lot of credit in the locker room,” Jarrett said. “We just dug a hole early and couldn’t get out of it.”
The Lady Spartans were helped on offense by LeNiesha Kearse (nine points) and Brooke Reed (eight points).
Lakeview freshman Katie White, starting in her first regular-season game with the team, was second on the team in scoring with 10 points. Senior Kelsey Gilbert added seven.
Carrick said that, while he is thrilled with the win, his team needs to focus more on limiting its turnovers to avoid letting opponents come back in the game like West Hall did on Tuesday.
“I was disappointed tonight partly because I thought we regressed from our scrimmage last Saturday,” he said. “We need to make (turnovers) more important in practice, so I’m just going to have to have a little lecture about how precious that basketball is.”
Lakeview faces Savannah Country Day at North Cobb Christian at 2 p.m. on Saturday in Kennesaw; West Hall faces Duluth at 9:30 a.m. Saturday in the Jefferson Tip-Off tournament.