SPOKANE — For 24 minutes, it wasn’t pretty.
Hardly anything was going right for the No. 5 Adna girls basketball team, reeling after a loss to Napavine in the 2B state quarterfinals a day ago. The Pirates found themselves trailing by double-digits heading into the fourth quarter of a loser-out consolation round game against No. 8 Mabton Friday afternoon.
Battling back to tie it late, and with mere seconds left on the clock, the Pirates went to sophomore Danika Hallom with the game on the line, and after almost losing the ball out of bounds and missing her first crack at it, Hallom put the game-winner through the back of the net on a putback with just 0.5 seconds left on the clock.
The shot gave the Pirates a 50-48 win over the Vikings, and ensured their first trophy as a program in over a decade.
“She’s a gamer, I can’t speak enough about the kid,” Pirates coach Chris Bannish said of Hallom. “It was a tale of 24 hours for us. People might question a lot of things about us, and sometimes we can’t score in spurts, but we’re pretty tough. Those three sophmores were here last year with deer in the headlights. One year later to do what she did, and to have tears of joy instead of tears of fear? It’s awesome.”
Less than 24 hours after their third loss to Napavine, and any hopes of a state championship were dashed, the Pirates were in another dogfight against a scrappy Vikings team also looking to trophy in a loser-out game.
Adna’s sophomore trio of Kendall Humphrey, Gaby Guard, and Hallom led the way with its seniors, Brooklyn Loose and Karlee VonMoos, pressing a bit in what could’ve been their final game.
Humphrey stepped up a scored when she needed to, finishing with four points, Guard paced the Pirates’ offense with 10 points early, and Hallom finished with 13 points and once again led the Pirate offense from start to finish as their lead guard.
“We had enough in the tank, this group wanted a trophy bad,” Bannish said. “On a night when our kids didn’t shoot well, Kendall Humphrey does all the intangibles, she’s the one throwing the passes over the top to Karlee, she makes all those plays. Danika gets us into our offense, and Kendall gets us to score.”
But despite some struggles in the first three quarters from its seniors, Adna’s Loose and VonMoos came up big when it needed them to.
VonMoos scored most of her team-high 16 points in the fourth quarter, hitting tough shot after tough shot to get Adna back into the game to eventually tie it up, and Loose hit a shot that gave the Pirates a brief lead with minutes left on a long ball from the left corner.
VonMoos also finished with a team-high 13 rebounds.
“They were in a hurry and pressing,” Bannish said of his two seniors. “There’s always four sets of arms on Karlee when she gets touches, but she came through in the fourth, and Brooklyn isn’t afraid of the big moment too often. She’s the best shooter in the building. I had full confidence in her.”
Bannish also credited Natalie Loose for her role in changing the game in the fourth, subbing Natalie in for defense to get the ball up the floor and then putting Brooklyn back in for offense to help stem the tide.
Now the Pirates will look forward to a 9:30 a.m. contest back at Spokane Arena, where they will play No. 6 La Conner in the fourth/sixth-place game Saturday morning.
“I told my seniors, ‘you’re not going out this way, things can turn around in a hurry,’” Bannish said. “That’s a tribute to those two seniors. The sophmores kept us in it, and the seniors won it for us. That’s really what it comes down to.”
