WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. – Charlotte Coody dominated the boards at both ends of the floor Friday to lead the Mount Greylock girls basketball team to a 39-36 win over Drury.
The win gave the Mounties (4-11) their second victory in four games and avenged a 10-point loss to the Blue Devils in January.
It also helped erase the memory of a disappointing loss to resurgent McCann Tech just 24 hours earlier.
“High school basketball is finicky,” Mount Greylock coach John Jacobbe said. “I knew Drury was lights out last night [against Agawam], and we scored eight points in a half.
“I just told our girls, ‘Don’t look back, look forward. Control what you can do tonight.’ We’re not the team we were last night. McCann played well, and we struggled, and we took it on the chin. Drury just played an outstanding game against Agawam, and we struggled. Let’s flip the switch.”
Jacobbe said for the first time this winter, Mount Greylock played as a unit, getting contributions from every player who took the floor, whether or not they ended up in the box score.
But the final stat sheet had big impressions from Coody and Abby Scialabba.
Coody, a first-year pivot, pulled down 27 rebounds while scoring 12 points.
Scialabba, a sophomore guard, scored 13 points: nine when the Mounties built an 11-point first-half lead and four when they were clinging to their lead in the fourth quarter.
“Abby is a scorer, and just played hard,” Jacobbe said. “For everybody, the focus today wasn’t how many points you scored. It was just play hard, and our focus was to rebound, defend, which we did better in the first half. But Abby played a great game, and Molly [Sullivan] played great.
“Charlotte, I don’t even know how many points she had, but she was all over the floor. … I just told her, ‘I don’t care how many points you had. Your 25 rebounds gave us possessions, time.’ It was an incredible effort. And she will make more putbacks. That time will come.”
Neither team could put the ball through the hoop very much in the early going.
It was a 5-5 game until the closing seconds of the first quarter, when Scialabba knocked down a 3-pointer to give the Mounties a lead they never relinquished.
She scored six more in the opening minutes of the second quarter – another triple and a conventional three-point play. The Mounties started the quarter with a 9-3 run to open up a nine-point lead.
They then ended the first half with a 6-0 spurt, getting four points from Sullivan and a putback from Emma Newberry to lead, 23-12 at half-time.
While the Mounties were motivated to “flip the switch” from a Thursday loss, the Blue Devils were dealing with a letdown after the Agawam game.
“I was worried, after our game last night, playing back-to-back, what our energy level was going to be,” Drury coach Ian Downey said. “And it was non-existent. That’s what I talked to them about [at half-time]. There was no energy on the offensive or defensive end. I said to them, ‘I don’t care about the 12 points. You’re going to score. What I didn’t like was the 23 points we gave up in the first half.’
“I saw no energy trying to help each other out. We weren’t fighting through screens, we weren’t going after rebounds. We were letting Charlotte [Coody] get whatever she wanted. No one wanted to box us out. And they dared us to make shots, and we didn’t make shots.”
Drury stepped up its defensive energy in the second half, forcing eight Mount Greylock turnovers – including several out of the full-court press – in the third quarter.
Offensively, though, it managed just seven points while holding the Mounties to three, and Drury went to the fourth quarter still behind, 26-19.
In the fourth quarter, Jacinta Felix took over at the offensive end for Drury, scoring 11 of her 15 points, including nine points at the foul line, to help get the Blue Devils back within a possession in the closing seconds.
“We’re going to have close games in the future, whether it’s Monday against Mount Everett or somewhere in the state tournament,” Downey said. “So, the fact that we were able to claw back and claw back and claw back and make it a game, hopefully we can learn from that. The problem is you can’t get down.
“Jacinta was hard on herself most of the game, and all I said to her was, ‘Just start going to the hoop.’ That’s her game: Go to the hoop and get to the free throw line.”
Felix scored all Drury’s points in a 6-1 run to get the lead down to 31-27 midway through the fourth, but Scialabba stopped the run with a 3-pointer to push the lead back to seven.
It was a nine-point margin with fewer than two minutes to play after Emma Gilooly set up Coody in transition.
But Alyssa Russell (eight points) and Kayla McGrath (10 points) hit triples and Felix converted a pair of free throws to get within three points, 39-36, with 6.4 seconds on the clock.
Mount Greylock managed to run five seconds off before Drury fouled to send the Mounties to the line for a one-and-one. After the first shot rimmed out, Drury got the rebound and called timeout with half a second on the clock, but the desperation inbounds pass was off the mark, and the three-point margin held up.
Drury (9-8) finishes the regular season on Monday at home against the Eagles.
Mount Greylock goes to Hopkins Academy on Monday.
