By T. Scott Boatright
SIMSBORO — If defense wins championships, the Quitman High School girls basketball team bears watching heading toward postseason play.
The Lady Wolverines traveled to Lincoln Parish Tuesday night and used a suffocating defense to smother Simsboro High’s girls 44-11 in a District 1-B match-up at the SHS Gym.
Quitman pulled out to a 15-4 lead by the end of the opening stanza and held the Lady Tigers to only two points in the second quarter on Ja’maya Crump’s second basket of the night.
Crump led Simsboro on the night with four points.
The Lady Wolverines’ Cali Deal, meanwhile, scored 13 of her game-best 15 points in the first half to power the Lady Wolverines to a 34-6 advantage at intermission.
“Quitman is No. 4 in the state for a reason,” said Simsboro coach Matt Herring. “They came out and showed that from the start. They have a senior (Deal) that’s really good and tough to handle, and tonight we didn’t. They’re a well-coached team that played really well tonight.”
“We shot the ball about as poorly as we could. We played bad, they played great.”
A running clock had already started before Simsboro scored its first point of the second with a little more than five minutes remaining to make the score 42-7 in favor of Quitman.
The Lady Wolverines pushed their lead to 42-9 by the end of the third quarter.
A Mohagany Mosley jumper with 5:06 remaining closed out the scoring for Simsboro, which fell to 11-10 and 2-1 in District 1-B with the loss.
Quitman moved to 14-9 and 2-1 in district play.
Herring said his Lady Tigers have a choice of how they respond to such a frustrating loss.
“I told them they can look at it one of two ways,” Herring said of his postgame talk with his team. “We can put our heads in the sand and not learn from it, or we can get back to work and learn from it. And this was the kind of loss we can learn a lot from.
“They were more physical than us tonight. We’ve got to learn to play more physical. We’ve got to learn how to handle pressure better, and get out of that pressure. We just did a poor job tonight of breaking their trap and attacking.”
But Herring believes his team will rebound from the tough loss.
“We’ve got a lot to learn and we’re going to get there,” Herring said. “We just have to keep working at it.”
