Molly Moulton Leads Drury Girls to Fifth Straight Win
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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. -- Molly Moulton scored a game-high 13 points to lead Drury to a hard fought 42-30 win over Mount Greylock Tuesday night.
After being held scoreless in the first half, Moulton came alive in the second, scoring seven of her points during a 14-6 run to end the game - a stretch that included key free throw shooting after Mount Greylock cut the lead to 28-24 with 5:18 left to play.
“One of the things we stress is you got to make free throws in close games.” Drury coach Brian Flagg said, ”Katlyn Toomey came up huge for us the whole game but especially her free throw shooting in the fourth quarter.”
Toomey and Olivia Carlson each chipped in with 10 points each for the Blue Devils (9-4) but more importantly they helped hold Jenna Benzinger to just eight points, four points under her average, while keeping her off the boards.
“We went in with a triangle and 2 to double Jenna on the rebound, because a lot of her points come from putbacks," Flagg said. “She’s just so dominant inside that if you give her those second chances, she is going to make you pay. I think we did pretty well keeping her off the boards.”
For Mount Greylock (9-5), Haley Reinhard and Benzinger each scored 8 points and Sarah Stripp chipped in with 6 points. The loss ends the Mounties five-game winning streak.
After a low scoring first half, the Blue Devils opened up a 26-19 lead heading into the 4th quarter. They would push the lead up to 28-20 and it looked like they were going to pull away. After a timeout the Mounties picked up the pressure leading to back to back buckets from Caroline Flynn to cut the lead to 28-24 with 5:18 to play leading to a Drury timeout to settle the team down.
“I just told them that, if we take care of the basketball we will win the game, we just can’t turn it over because that’s been our Achilles heel," Flagg said. “We’ve played a lot of teams real close but we have one quarter where we turn it over. So I told them to take a deep breath, run our stuff and be patient.”
The team responded by breaking the press resulting in Moulton scoring a lay up with a foul. She would go ahead and make the free throw to push the lead to 32-24 with 4:12 left to play. Reinhard would hit a runner in the lane to cut the lead to 34-26 with 2:19 left but Jenna Moulton answered with a baseline jumper with 1:20 left to push the lead back up to double digits.
Drury will travel to Mounument on Friday and Mount Greylock will head to Mount Everett Friday night.