RIDGEFIELD — Back in its very first game this season, the Tumwater girls basketball team barely scraped by a tough, stingy Washougal squad in its season opener, 56-51, in November.
Now three months later, in the 2A District IV semifinals at Ridgefield Monday, the Thunderbirds handled the Panthers from start to finish in a dominant 46-26 win to move on to the district championship.
The T-Birds will play Hudson’s Bay on Friday in Battle Ground, looking to repeat as district champions.
“It feels awesome,” T-Bird guard Aubrey Amendala said. “Working so hard for something and getting there, it’s awesome.”
It didn’t come nearly as easy as the score suggested, however, as the Thunderbirds struggled to put the ball through the net and relied on a dominant defense to beat the Panthers.
The Panthers shot just 19.6% from the field and made one 3-pointer. They scored in single digits in three quarters, and just seven points combined in the first and third quarter.
“They’re such a good team, we worked a lot on how we wanted to guard that,” Tumwater coach Robin Johnson said. “I thought the kids executed well. We wanted to limit their big scorers’ numbers.”
Paced by Aubrey Amendala’s 14 points, and Natalie Sumrok’s 12 points, the T-Birds did enough on offense to get the job done and move on in the district tournament.
“They were really strong defensively, they play tough, they made it really difficult for us to score,” Johnson said. “We just talked about, even if it didn’t come easy, to keep grinding and trying to get to the rim and trying to get buckets any way we can get them.”
The Thunderbirds said the key to Monday’s game, as opposed to their previous game with the Panthers back in November, was defense, and their adjustment on the boards, with small guard Regan Brewer pulling down a team-high eight rebounds and the rest of the T-Birds putting in work inside.
“We definitely have worked on our defense and poise,” Amendala said. “Defense brings the energy, and we still missed layups throughout the whole game, but getting stops on defense was huge.”
In Hudson’s Bay, Tumwater will have its hands full in a completely new way, with the Eagles looking to push the pace and play small after a 33-30 defensive-minded win over W.F. West in their semifinal contest.
“They have a good point guard,” Johnson said. “We’ll have to come up with a gameplan, and hopefully we can get into an offense a little bit more than we were able to here.”
