With bragging rights once again on the line, Peninsula defeats rival Gig Harbor to advance to district championship
Two out of three against the crosstown rivals? Go ahead and sign the Peninsula High School girls basketball team up.
After splitting the regular season series, Peninsula came out on top against Gig Harbor in the West Central III/Southwest bi-district semifinals on Friday night at Puyallup High School, 56-51.
Bragging rights now belong to the Seahawks.
“Nothing compares to it,” said Peninsula senior Belle Frazier, who scored a game-high 29 points in the win. “I’ve never been in this moment before and our school hasn’t been in this position for a lot of years. It’s just amazing.”
Before this season, Frazier hadn’t beat Gig Harbor a single time in her high school career. Now, she and the Seahawks have two wins against the Tides in the same season.
The game, like the others before it, was a back-and-forth affair. Gig Harbor took a five-point lead into the locker room at half, but Peninsula responded with a big third quarter, outscoring the Tides 24-8 in the period.
“I think our confidence just grew,” Frazier said. “Our student section got louder and louder and louder. Just the energy of the whole gym just contributed to the energy level rising. We started hitting our shots, caught fire and it just worked out in our favor.”
Seeing the same team for the third time in one season is a unique challenge, given the familiarity the players and coaching staffs have with each other.
“Our coach asked us, ‘Do you even want to watch film? We know them,’” said Peninsula sophomore guard Linsey Lovrovich, who scored eight points for the Seahawks.
Ultimately, they still watched film, perhaps if only as a reminder of the tall task they’d have of trying to slow down Gig Harbor senior Brynna Maxwell, who scored a school-record 48 points just two days earlier against Hudson’s Bay.
“We just tried to limit how much she could score,” Lovrovich said. “We tried to put a kind of diamond defense on her to go along with our man-to-man.”
And when Gig Harbor had climbed back into the game again late in the fourth quarter, trailing by three with under 15 seconds to go, the Tides looked to Maxwell at the top of the key.
That’s when Frazier popped out from behind Maxwell and earned a critical steal for the Seahawks.
“We know it’s coming into Maxwell,” Frazier said. “She’s a phenomenal shooter. She had 48 points in the last game. So we knew the ball was coming to her. I was just playing help defense and saw it coming and had to go get it.”
This story was originally published February 16, 2019 at 1:11 AM.
