TACOMA — A 29-25 halftime deficit against Cleveland in the Class 3A state championship game was the bad news for the Lynnwood girls basketball team on Saturday afternoon.
The good news?
“We felt like things didn’t go our way in the first half,” said Royals coach Everett Edwards. “We felt like (the Eagles) were hitting everything and we felt like there were some 50-50 (officials’) calls that didn’t go our way. So we felt very good only being down four (points).”
Edwards and all the Royals felt even better in the early moments of the third quarter as an 8-0 scoring burst put Lynnwood on top to stay, save for a brief tie later in the period. The Royals slowly padded their margin until the game’s late minutes and then turned back a final Cleveland rally for an eventual 54-42 victory at the Tacoma Dome.
The decisive second half was the key for Lynnwood, and it clinched the Royals’ first team state championship in school history.
“We felt like in the first half everything went their way,” Edwards said. “Things kind of didn’t go our way, but we were still only down four points. So we thought if we just kept fighting the fight that we’d be able to persevere in the second half. And thank goodness we were able to.”
It was a game of two very distinct halves. In the first two quarters, Lynnwood junior wing Mikayla Pivec gave a heroic effort, scoring 22 of her team’s 25 points (sophomore center Kelsey Rogers scored the other three) to keep the Royals close.
But in the second half Lynnwood got other players involved, most notably junior wing Jordyn Edwards, who scored all of her 12 points after halftime.
“We didn’t really talk about it (at halftime), but personally I wanted to step it up in the second half,” said Edwards, the coach’s daughter who had two layins early in the third quarter to jump-start the team’s offensive flurry.
In addition, the Royals tightened their defense over the final two periods. Sticking with their zone defense “and then mixing in a little man-to-man,” Everett Edwards said, Lynnwood held Cleveland to just four field goals in the second half. By contrast, the Eagles had 11 field goals in the first two quarters.
By increasing their overall intensity, he went on, “we felt it was a situation where our conditioning would kick in. We were down a major player — Monty Cooper (injured in Friday’s game against Wilson) is very impactful for our team — but I think our conditioning and our overall team defense came through in the second half.”
As for Cleveland, “we played hard for parts of the game, but we didn’t play hard for 32 minutes,” said coach Jamie Redd, a former University of Washington player. “And in the third and fourth quarters, we struggled to score. Hats off to Lynnwood. They’re an excellent team.”
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