AUGUSTA — Once Natasha Haley got going, her Rangeley girls basketball teammates followed along, and the Lakers pulled away for a 55-28 win over Pine Tree Academy in a Class D South quarterfinal game Monday.
“We definitely look for her in a lot of ways,” Rangeley coach Heidi Deery said. “She’s a great player, and we’re preparing for other teams trying to stop her.”
Rangeley opened the game by going more than five minutes without a field goal, and trailed the Breakers 4-3.
Then Haley hit a 3-pointer. Then she hit another trey, and then another to give the Lakers a 12-6 lead after one quarter.
“I just knew that I needed to take them to get confidence,” Haley said. “And that even if I was missing, I needed to keep shooting to get out of it.”
Haley scored the Lakers’ first four points of the second quarter, giving her 15 of their first 16 points. Then the rest of the team got going, starting with Vanessa Bisson’s post basket and Winnie LaRochelle’s layup.
Haley said that the difference was the Lakers started running and creating fastbreaks.
“We just made a decision that we wanted to score and that we wanted to run the fastbreak because we knew we’d be successful,” she said.
Haley finished with 18 points in the first half, and 23 in the game.
Haley is the Lakers’ lone senior, and most of the team is underclassmen, including a pair of eighth-graders, LaRochelle and Emily Eastlack.
“With the exception of Tash, we had a pretty young group out there,” Deery said. “And so sometimes their inexperience shows, I think, in their decision-making on the court.”
Deery didn’t like Rangeley’s ball movement, but that it improved in the second half.
“You’re not going to play your best game every night,” she said, “but we certainly are capable of playing better, but we definitely are moving the ball better (in the second half), and I felt like we were rebounding the ball better.
Junior Brooke Egan added 13 points, 10 in the second half, for Rangeley. Eastlack had six while Bisson and LaRochelle each scored four.
Adriana DePalma led Pine Tree (5-14) with 11 points. She bounced back after picking up four fouls in the first half to play foul-free and score nine points in the second. Emily Schlisner finished with nine points for the Breakers.
Next up for Rangeley (17-2) is a semifinal matchup with Temple (12-7) on Thursday morning back at Augusta Civic Center.
“It’s definitely nice to get the first one under our belts to get your confidence, get all the jitters out,” Haley said.
The Lakers won both regular-season meetings with Temple, including 69-32 at home on Jan. 2, and 41-34 in Waterville on Feb. 6.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
