By TODD TRAUB
Leader sports editor
Cabot committed the first turnover of Tuesday’s game at Jacksonville. It only seemed like Jacksonville committed all the rest.
Cabot rolled to a 72-35 girls victory at the Devil’s Den, harassing Jacksonville with its aggressive defense and turning multiple turnovers into points.
“We’re really trying to improve our defense and we’re pleased with the way the girls played,” Cabot coach Carla Crowder said. “We were able to involve a lot of players.”
Jacksonville committed 33 turnovers with 16 leading to points.
“We were pretty much not running the press breaker,” Jacksonville coach Katrina Mimms said. “I think that’s pretty much what they do and we just didn’t handle it.”
Cabot’s Eliot Taylor lost the ball out of bounds for the first turnover of the game, but Jacksonville lost the ball twice, with the second turnover leading to Jaylin Bridges’ layup that opened the scoring and set the tone for the night.
Jacksonville never led and forced a 2-2 tie, the only one, when Jessica Jackson made a layup with 5:13 left.
Melissa Wolff hit a jumper for Cabot to start a 14-4 run from inside to make it 18-6 with 45.3 seconds left in the first quarter.
The closest Jacksonville would get after that was 18-8 when Nichole Bennett responded with a layup with 31 seconds to go.
The Lady Panthers outscored the Lady Red Devils 24-10 in the second quarter to take a 44-18, halftime lead.
“We haven’t seen any man-to-man this year,” Mimms said. “This was our first test with it. We flunked.”
Jackson, a sophomore who has been drawing major-college interest since before her freshman season, tried to give Jacksonville a spark when she scored her team’s first eight points of the second half, but despite her efforts Cabot continued to pull away.
Wolff made a floater in the lane for the 60-30 lead with less than 45 seconds left in the third quarter to start the clock running under the sportsmanship/timing rule.
Mimms said the Lady Red Devils, playing the second of three consecutive games, tried too hard to be a one-player show, passing up opportunities as they tried to get the ball to Jackson.
“We got in a hurry and fed the ball back to Jessica too much and tried to rely on her too much instead of moving the basketball and hitting the open person,” Mimms said.
But Mimms, who has started mainly freshmen and sophomores, said such growing pains are to be expected with a young team.
“We were hoping to be way more competitive than we were, that’s the bottom line,” Mimms said. “We wanted to be right there. We wanted to be able to take care of the basketball and be able to execute on offense coming out of the dressing room against a man-to-man.”
Crowder said she wasn’t trying to exploit Jacksonville’s youth as much as she was simply trying to refine her own team’s game.
Wolff led Cabot with 20 points, Taylor added 12 and Laci Boyett scored 11. Jackson led Jacksonville with 15 points and Bennett scored 11.
