Lady Hawks cap successful season

"In tournaments anything can happen, and it usually does,” Thompson Falls girls basketball coach Chadd Laws said just days before his Lady Hawks traveled to Bozeman for the this past weekend’s State Class C basketball tournament.

Shots that normally fall clang off the rim. Rebounds that are usually collected fall into the other side’s hands.

So it was for the Thompson Falls girls who fell to Harlem 61-39 in their opening game Thursday morning at the MSU Fieldhouse. Twenty-four hours later their season came to an end when they ran into the Glasgow Scotties in consolation play and watched as Scotties’ center Sabrina Harsh gobbled up every stray rebound in sight on their way to a 46-30 victory over the Lady Hawks.

Two and done was not the plan. But it was the fate for this talented and hearty Lady Hawks team and what became a roller coaster season.

Entering state play as the number two seed from the Western Division, T Falls was matched with the Harlem Wildcats, the only team in the championship with a losing record.

For the Lady Wildcats, it was a matter of getting hot at the right time, at least for the first game of the tournament.

A raggedly played first quarter concluded with Thompson Falls holding a slim 10-8 lead. The Lady Hawks usually crisp passing game was missing in action as they turned what were always sure-fire tosses into turnovers.

And while they crafted a two-point lead, the shots that normally found nothing but twine earlier in the year, were bouncing off the rim or missing it altogether.

After an exchange of ties and leads throughout the opening minutes of the second quarter, Harlem began to find the basket behind the shooting of Taya Trottier, who would finish with a game-best 22 points.

By halftime the Wildcats had forged a 24-15 lead, taking advantage of some untimely Lady Hawks turnovers along the way.

T Falls junior Ellie Baxter scored in the opening seconds of the third quarter to trim that lead to 24-17, but that was as close as Thompson Falls could get. A series of Harlem three-pointers helped the Wildcats build a solid 42-26 point lead heading into the final eight minutes of play.

Baxter, who led the Hawks with 15 points, and the normally rebound-conscious T Falls front line, could not keep up with Harlem on the boards during the third quarter and that continued into quarter number four.

Despite a pair of brief rallies, Harlem managed to hold onto its early lead and won to earn a trip to the semi-finals Friday.

The loss pushed T Falls into consolation play and a Friday morning loser-out game with Glasgow, which opened the tourney Thursday by losing to eventual champion Colstrip.

And it was in that consolation game that T Falls ran into a one-person scoring and rebounding machine in the 6-1 Harsh.

Both teams were perhaps still reeling from their opening round losses and the effects of a long season as each struggled to score. And it was in the first quarter that Baxter was on the receiving end of a wild elbow that bloodied her nose and kept her out of action off-and-on until the fourth quarter. Without their leading scorer and with Harsh imitating a vacuum cleaner on the backboards, Glasgow began to pull away from a 5-2 first quarter lead.

With Harsh rebounding, scoring and passing to open players, the Lady Scotties built a 20-7 lead by the end of the first half.

Harsh and company continued to stretch that lead throughout the third quarter on their way to a 33-13 advantage heading into the final period of play.

Showing they still had some fire left, T Falls managed to cut the lead to 10 points, 35-25, but could not get any closer the rest of the way.

Harsh wound up with a game-best 20 points to go with the 17 rebounds she gathered during the game. She was also instrumental in finding teammates with open shots as the Scotties lived to play another game.

For T Falls, which was led in scoring by Natalie Roberts’ nine points and seven from Baxter, who re-injured her nose in the opening minutes of the fourth quarter in what appeared to be a clash of heads in the ruggedly played game.

The Lady Hawks finished the season with a 16-10 overall record.

Colstrip won the state title Saturday evening by beating Jefferson 56-43. Bigfork beat Glasgow 59-49 in the third/fourth place consolation game.