PUTNAM COUNTY
The Gatewood girls’ basketball team (14-4) kept rolling last week with three quality road wins.
The Lady Gators dominated both Peachtree Academy (52-12) and Young Americans Christian (93-11), completing season sweeps of both the Lady Panthers and Lady Eagles. They then earned a 45-40 payback win over Edmund Burke Academy.
The Lady Gators shot a season-high 87 percent as a team from the free-throw line against Peachtree last Tuesday. They also had team season highs on Thursday with 35 steals and 24 assists against Young American.
Gatewood head coach Jordan Walters stated the PA and YACS wins were more important than they may have appeared.
“It wasn’t the hardest competition, but sometimes those are the toughest games to play,” she said. “I was very pleased with Thursday. We played way better Thursday than we did on Tuesday. And played our game, as opposed to playing down to our competition’s level.”
Then came the Lady Gators’ revenge victory over Edmund Burke after losing to the Lady Spartans 35-34 at home in Eatonton early this month.
“We beat a very well-coached and hard-hustling kind of team,” Walters said of EBA. “We came in and started out extremely slow. We were down 11-1 at the end of the first quarter.”
Gatewood picked up the slack and played at a faster pace in the second quarter and was able to claw their way back into contention, despite losing starter Carly Cannon. The junior point guard suffered a game-ending knee injury against the Lady Spartans, Walters said.
“That kind of hurt, but we never slowed down when (Cannon) got injured. We didn’t hesitate and kept playing our brand of basketball,” the coach said. “In the second quarter, we were able to come back and ended up winning that ball game by five (points) in the fourth. I was very, very proud of their fight and grit instead of letting some of the obstacles that we met in that ball game be too big for us to overcome. So, I was extremely proud of the girls.”
Gatewood senior Anna Williamson scored a game-high 14 points against Edmund Burke on Saturday. Junior London Darden also added 11 points in the victory over the Lady Spartans.
The Lady Gators had two other different leading scorers on Tuesday and Thursday. Gatewood eighth-grader Lauren Paxson scored 11 points, followed by both Williamson and sophomore Sarah Mansfield with 10 points apiece against Peachtree Academy on Tuesday.
The Lady Gators then had five players score in the double-digits on Thursday against YACS, including freshman Riley Roberts with 19 points and junior Eliana Tkacik, who added 15 points. Williamson, Mansfield and Paxson also registered a dozen points each in the win.
The Lady Gators are looking to continue getting that kind of production from several different players entering region play. All three teams they’ll face in GIAA Region 2-AA – Brentwood Academy, Westminster Christian and Piedmont Academy – have winning records, though Gatewood remains on top at 14-4 overall.
Still, Walters said the Lady Gators realize the rest of their schedule is going to be “a dogfight.”
“However, I think we are sitting right where we need to be in our region as a team,” she added. “Getting that big win Saturday, kind of seeing that fight in those girls, it’s all coming together at the perfect time in order for us to prepare for region play.”