Lincoln denies Bonney Lake’s upset bid to win 3A PCL girls basketball tournament
Faced with adversity for really the first time all season, the Lincoln Abes girls basketball team overcame.
Lincoln trailed at the half for the first time all season on Saturday. The Abes responded with a huge third quarter and hung on to beat Bonney Lake, 57-53, to win the Class 3A Pierce County League championship.
“They’re good,” Lincoln coach Jamila Jones said. “They’re gritty. The difference is, a lot of teams, once we start applying pressure, they tap out. We knew they weren’t going to. I tried to tell the girls it was coming.”
From the start, when Mariah Preston made the game’s first two field goals for the Panthers (6-4), who went up 4-0, Lincoln was playing catchup. The Abes (11-0) scored the final five points of the first quarter to get the game tied at 14-14, but Bonney Lake jumped back in front with an 11-3 run over the first four minutes of the second quarter.
Leading 25-17 at that point, though, the Abes pressure shut down the Bonney Lake offense the rest of the way as Lincoln closed the gap by the break to just 25-23.
“We trailed one quarter (previously),” Jones said. “We were down two and we played our worst half of basketball.”
Facing their first halftime deficit of the season, the Abes got a huge third quarter from senior Kristol Ayson, who scored 12 of her game-high 20 points in the quarter.
“I was just kind of thinking about what I’ve been doing all year,” Ayson said. “I knew what I was capable of, and I just had to execute it.”
Ayson made two free throws with 48 seconds left in the third quarter, extending the Lincoln lead to double digits for the first time all game, 44-34. The Abes took a 44-36 advantage into the fourth quarter.
As Jones predicted, the Panthers didn’t wilt, however.
Evin Elias made a 3-pointer to open the scoring in the final quarter for Bonney Lake. That lit a 12-5 spurt that got the Panthers back within a point, 49-48, on Elias’s second three ball of the quarter with 5:41 to play.
“We’re just thrilled that we did that well against a good team,” Bonney Lake coach Kim Peters said. “They’re super talented. They’re super athletic. We tried.”
Ayson’s only basket of the fourth quarter extended the lead back to three, 51-48, with 4:05 left.
Twice more, Bonney Lake would get within two – the last at 55-53 on two free throws from Jazmyn Shipp with 1:08 left. The Panthers followed with a stop at the other end, then had four attempts to tie the game from inside the lane before Lincoln finally got a defensive rebound, got the ball out and Jaleigha Robinson made a title-clinching shot with 32 seconds left.
“It was actually really relieving,” Ayson said. “It’s way funner when there is competition. I appreciate them for playing hard.”
The Panthers played hard, but at the end it was Ayson clutching the PCL Championship plaque.
“We’re champions,” Ayson said. “We did that. We did that. The season that we got, this was my last year. We knew we needed to go all out. We all wanted it.”
Ayson is one of just three seniors who played their final game with Lincoln. The youth that returns has their coach ready to start again quickly.
“I love our future,” Jones said. “Our young kids, our bigs, we’re going to get them in the gym this summer. We’re ready to get after it.”