Lady Mustangs roll over Live Oak in final home game, 58-37.
GILROY – After suffering two straight double-digit losses, the Gilroy High girls basketball team got a much-needed boost of confidence Thursday – walking all over neighboring rival Live Oak, 58-37.
“This game, we all really wanted it – especially for the seniors because this is our last home game,” said senior guard Laura Hennessee, T-CAL’s leading scorer who netted a team-high 24 points. “So it was emotional, but at the same time we just wanted to have fun and we did. We had fun and we won. It all came together.”
The Lady Mustangs (5-5 in T-CAL, 15-11 overall) now await their Central Coast Section Playoff seed – which will be determined at Sunday’s section meeting.
“It’s the end now. It’s kind of sad, but we ended it on a good note,” Hennessee said. “In CCS, the teams are better so you have to go in there and not joke around as much. You have to go in with confidence and you have to just play as hard as you can the whole time. Once you lose, you’re out. It’s all or nothing.”
Gilroy finished third place in the Tri-County Athletic League behind champion Notre Dame-Salinas and second-place North Salinas – which helped the locals out by topping Salinas in its finale, 47-36.
“From here out, it’s just the end. You win or you’re done. It’s a different deal now. It’s my first time going into this so we’re going to see how well we do,” first-year head coach Kari Williams said. “Hopefully, we’ll get a good seed and I told the girls no matter what to win you’ve got to beat everybody so it doesn’t matter where we get seeded. We’re just going to go in and try to play good, hard basketball and see what that gets us.”
That got the Lady Mustangs a comfortable lead early on in the regular-season finale against the Lady Acorns. Gilroy led 16-6 at the end of the first quarter, 25-9 at halftime, and 44-21 at the end of the third quarter.
“We were a little down after our last game so it was good to get. We needed a game where everybody got it, everybody played a lot, everybody did a lot of things,” Williams said. “We had a great game from everybody.”
Junior center Sarah Hoeft netted 11 of her 17 points through the first two quarters, while junior Antionette Okere (six points), junior Sarah Miller (four points), sophomore Kendall Costa (two points), sophomore Sarah Whitney (three points), senior Danell Dow (one point), and sophomore Michelle DiFiore (one point) all contributed.
“Hoeft played great. For her, it was one of her top games,” Williams said. “We just needed to shoot well. We took a lot of good shots in the second half and we made them. That was a big deal for us.”
The Lady Mustangs return to the postseason one year after winning a first-round playoff home game before losing on the road in the second round.
“We just have to have the confidence like we had in this game in all of the rest of our games and hopefully we can go far,” Hennessee said.
