MANCHESTER, NH – Don’t call it a comeback.
OK, you can call it a comeback … or a rally, or a second-half charge. Whatever you call it, make sure you call it a win for the Manchester West High School girls basketball team.
The 1-10 Blue Knights welcomed 4-9 Plymouth to town Tuesday evening, and after going down, 25-11 in the first half, flipped the script on their foes from the north, dropping 29 second-half points en route to a 40-34 win.
So what was the difference in the second half? First-year West head coach Ashley Berube said it wasn’t magic, just good basketball.
“I basically just tried to pull the ‘our season’s almost over, you only have a few games left, so let’s go, you’ve got nothing to lose, really,'” said Berube of her halftime speech. “And they pulled it together and got a good win.”
“We’re not a team that’s used to going on a run and getting up like that, and I think we got too comfortable,” said Plymouth head coach Brittany Lucas. “I said the sneaky thing about West, or a team that hasn’t had a winning season, is they can come out and effort is going to be the thing that wins the game, and we got outplayed, we did … they adjusted well and we didn’t adjust with them.”
Senior captain Nyanakuak Piok led the come from behind effort with 19 rebounds and 10 points.
“Even the stuff that doesn’t show up in the books, you know the ball tips and the hustle plays, she really turned the game around for us,” said Berube.
Sophomore guard Adrianna Perron paced the offense with 10 points of her own, in addition to multiple timely assists, and junior Ajaelah Poulin also dropped 10 points on Plymouth, including 7 in the fourth quarter.
Lucas said win or lose, the experience of a tight, hard-fought game is never a bad thing.
“In Division II, I think have two ends of the spectrum, you have the highest of the high, and then you have this lower group that can compete,” she said. “So I think it is a good thing to have a 1-point game with 3 (minutes) left. It’s not a 30-point blowout, so in that sense, it was good for these two programs to compete, where there was something to fight for and every possession matters and you have to be smart basketball players.”
West currently sits 18th out of 22 teams in Division II but is 2 wins out of the top 14.
With eight games remaining on the schedule – including a 6:30 p.m. Thursday home matchup against 8-5 Oyster River – the Blue Knights playoff hopes are still alive, but regardless of what their record down the stretch ends up being, Berube said she just hopes to see more basketball like she saw Tuesday night.
“You saw the second half of the game. They need to play like that every quarter, every half,” she said. “That’s my goal for them, to continue to play at that level.”
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