Defense rules early, Kamiakin girls complete weekend sweep of city rivals

While Kennewick seems like the biggest threat to end the Kamiakin High School girls basketball team’s reign of dominance among the MCC’s 3A squads, the Braves showed on Saturday night there’s still a mighty deficit among the city’s three teams.

In a game that started slow but picked up momentum late, Oumou Toure scored 25 points and Alexa Hazel 22 to lead Kamiakin to a 67-43 MCC victory in the Lions Den.

It made for a weekend sweep of the reigning league champion Braves’ city rivals, as they topped Southridge 75-25 on Friday in their league opener.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” Hazel said. “We’ve got some big goals this season, and in order to get there, it’s just going to be one step at a time.”

With offense a struggle for both teams in the first half, it didn’t take much for the Braves to jump out to a lead. They scored the game’s first eight points to eventually go up 12-4 at the end of the first quarter, then rattled off 11 straight in the second period for a 31-19 advantage at the half, which would be their smallest lead for the remainder of the game.

“It seemed like we couldn’t quite get in the flow,” Kamiakin coach Lane Schumacher said of the slow start. “We played well defensively, held them to four points in the first quarter, but our offense was a little stagnant. Part of it was their (Kennewick’s) defense, credit them, but we finally kind of figured it out and played better.”

Kamiakin (7-1, 2-0) defended well early, but struggled to penetrate Kennewick’s zone, anchored by 6-foot-4 center Alicia Oatis. Those problems cleared when the Braves cranked up the defensive pressure to create transition buckets, and Hazel found success from long range as she splashed a half-dozen treys on the night.

“You’ve gotta go in confidently and expect to make ‘em, and when they don’t go in, you’ve gotta shoot through those slumps,” Hazel said. “At halftime we talked about how we needed to work our outside game because they were running a zone. The lanes were clogged up, so it made it easy to work the outside shot.”

In addition to her work on the defensive end, Oatis paced the Lions (3-2, 1-1) with 17 points, two shy of her career best.

“She did a nice job for them on the offensive end, and caused us a lot of trouble,” Schumacher said. “She has a nice touch around the basket, and we didn’t do a great job of collapsing and helping to double down on her with our guards like we had practiced. We were a little slow getting to the post.”

Up next

Kamiakin: Hosts Walla Walla on Tuesday and Chiawana on Thursday before a two-week winter break.

Kennewick: A busy week lies ahead as it plays at Hanford on Tuesday and Richland on Thursday, then hosts Evergreen on Friday.

This story was originally published December 16, 2017 at 8:13 PM with the headline "Defense rules early, Kamiakin girls complete weekend sweep of city rivals."