Park Hill South senior Avery Simmons finished with a team-high 17 points in the 51-43 win over Liberty on Feb. 16.
LIBERTY – Being in a bit of a rut as of late, the Park Hill South girls’ basketball team (12-10) bounced back from losing two of its last three games with a big conference win on Feb. 16.
Out of the final four regular season games, Park Hill South plays Liberty (11-12) twice – not including a first-round meeting in districts – and the first one resulted in a 51-43 win. It had been nine days since the Lady Panthers’ last win at the time, as they were coming off back-to-back losses.
“It’s important to get back on that winning track when we played hard in two games, obviously lost them both, but we were able to get this one tonight,” Park Hill South girls’ basketball coach Josh Dorr said. “We didn’t have school today and it’s always hard when you don’t have school during the day so that’s always a little bit difficult to kind of get the juice going but we took care of business.”
Liberty made a three in the opening minute before Park Hill South responded with an 11-0 run, being ahead of the Silver Division opponent from then until the final buzzer. Addison Bjorn scored or assisted on six of the first seven points – all of which were in transition – and Avery Simmons had seven of the 13 first quarter points.
“We just made a little mental mistake on defense, gave them a shot that we knew they can make early, but the big thing was it didn’t faze us. They came down, we ran our offense, ran some of our sets and were able to get some easy stuff in transition,” Dorr said.
The Lady Panthers continued to move the ball in the second quarter, ending the first half with all eight made field goals being assisted on. The strong passing led to Lady Blue Jays being behind 21-14 at halftime of their courtwarming.
“I think tonight they really did a great job of moving the ball around. I’m excited to see the stats, how many assists we had, because you saw a lot of ball movement, which we’ve really been pushing that a lot more lately,” Dorr said.
Paige Farber came off the bench in the third quarter and brought a spark to the offense, converting on back-to-back buckets with right over a minute left to push the margin to 15 points. In the final 4:20 of the game, Liberty clawed back in with four of its seven made 3-pointers to cut the deficit as close as six points, but Bjorn and Simmons knocked down some free throws late to move to 5-3 in the conference.
“We called that one timeout late, and I told them all they’re going to do is shoot threes at this point because they’re trying to get themselves back in the game. That 3-point line changes things if they can hit them, obviously, so that’s going to help them kind of claw their way back in,” Dorr said.
The reigning conference player of the year showed her dominance as Bjorn tallied 16 points, 17 rebounds and six assists. Simmons ended with 17 points – climbing the latter and nearing 1,000 points in her career – and Ava Kells finished with 12 points and 10 rebounds, her fourth career double-double.
The morning after the contest, the Class 6 District 8 Tournament bracket was released as Park Hill South is the No. 3 seed and Liberty is the No. 6 seed. After playing in the regular season finale on Feb. 22, they will meet for the third time in 12 days in the opening round on Feb. 28 at Liberty High School at 5:30 p.m.