Drury Girls Advance Past Mahar

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. – The Drury girls basketball team has had better offensive nights this winter.

 

But its top offensive player was able to take up some of the slack.

 

Jacinta Felix scored a game-high 21 points Tuesday to lead the Blue Devils to a 58-25 win over Mahar in the quarter-finals of the Western Massachusetts Class C Tournament.

 

The third-seeded Blue Devils qualified for the Division 5 State Tournament with their 10th win of the season and advanced to Thursday’s Western Mass semi-finals at No. 2 Renaissance.

 

Drury used a 23-2 run that spanned the second and third quarters to open up a 22-point lead and never looked back in improving to 10-9 this winter.

 

Felix scored 13 points during that run, including Drury’s first eight points of the second half, capping the run with a steal and an and-one to make it 33-11 with 5 minutes, 6 seconds left in the third.

 

“If she’s scoring, we will score in the 50s,” Drury coach Ian Downey said of Felix. “I always say, our defense is good enough that as long as we hold teams under 40, we’re good. And if Jacinta is clicking like she was tonight, and we get in the 50s, we’re going to have a really good shot the rest of the way.”

 

Felix grabbed eight rebounds and passed out three assists to go with her 21 points. She also had a few steals in a Drury defensive attack that wore down the Senators as the game went on.

 

Mahar committed 34 turnovers, at least half going into Drury’s full-court press.

 

Ashlyn Hayden scored eight points, and Elise Daly had seven for the Blue Devils.

 

Mahar got 15 points from Hayden Comeau, who went 11-for-14 at the free throw line.

 

Comeau hit a pair from the line in the first minute of the second quarter to get Mahar within one at 10-9 after a low-scoring first quarter.

 

Drury then scored the next nine points.

 

Felix hit one of her four 3-pointers with an assist from Ella Bond to start the run. Addisyn Sheppard hit a baseline jumper. Then a turnover off the press led to a pair of Felix free throws which she converted. And Ashlyn Hayden scored in the post to give Drury its first double-digit lead at 19-9.

 

The Senators got a pair of free throws with 2:45 left until half-time, but Drury finished the half with six straight points to take a 25-11 lead into the locker room.

 

Spurred by Felix’s 11-point third quarter, Drury’s offense picked up in the second half, but Downey noted there is a reason for the early scoring woes.

 

“We haven’t played since last Monday, so I was a little concerned with rust, and if I go look at our shooting percentage, it’s not going to be very good for the game,” he said. “But the biggest thing was, no matter how many days off you’ve had, your defense cannot be rusty.

 

“And I actually thought, defensively, we were good. We were fine. I knew as long as we could hold them, eventually we’d start rolling, and that’s what happened.”

 

Now Drury gets a rematch with Renaissance, a 50-37 winner when the teams met a year ago in the Western Mass quarter-finals.

 

“Last year, we didn’t know much about them, we didn’t know the [Boland Elementary School] gym was going to be small, so it caught us off guard a little bit,” Downey said. “I’m hoping this year, knowing what the gym is like, what type of team they are, we’ll be ready to go.

 

“Last year, we got off to a pretty slow start and then got it going in the second half. We can’t have that happen because Renaissance is a good team.”