Bexley girls basketball feels no pressure, defeats Granville 48-28

BEXLEY, Ohio – The Bexley girls basketball team is the No. 3 seed for the district tournament which begins next week, but the Lions knew they weren't looked at as the favorite Tuesday against Granville.

The two-time defending district-champion Blue Aces are the top seed and have been bullying opponents all season with their defense, but they had the tables turned on them by Bexley in a non-league matchup of Division II area powers that each have eyes on playing in March.

The Lions limited Granville to seven points in each quarter and cruised to a 48-28 victory that was in sharp contrast to the way things turned out at the district tournament drawing nine days prior.

“We played free because we knew the pressure wasn’t on us,” Lions fourth-year head coach Bryce Baugh said. “We played as hard as we could for as long as we could, and that’s the only way we know how to play. The only people who thought we were going to win were the people in our locker room, because you look at them and every single team in the district voted for them to be No. 1. They had all the pressure.”

Bexley, which improved to 18-3, settled for a runner-up finish in the MSL-Ohio Division but is hoping the win can springboard the program into its best postseason finish since it was a regional runner-up in 2004.

The Lions haven’t made it even to a district final since that time, including last winter when they went 18-5 but lost in a district semifinal.

“Our first goal was (to win our) league and now it’s what we can do in the postseason,” senior wing player Sydnie Smith said. “We’ve been known to not do well in the postseason in my four years, with last year being the first year (of my prep career that) we won a postseason game. Now it’s let’s make it far. Let’s do it.”

An Iowa commit in women’s track and field and also a key player on the girls volleyball team which went 17-7 last fall, Smith averages 15 points and five rebounds.

In the win over Granville, which dropped to 18-2, she finished with 15 points including scoring the first seven points for the Lions as they led 13-7 after one period.

“Last year offensively, we just struggled a little bit,” Smith said. “We’ve jelled more and we’ve found our momentum. We’ve been a defensive team and this year we’ve just stepped up. We’ve all been playing together since middle school, so it’s really fun to come back and be with the same people we’ve been with since middle school.”

Granville committed four turnovers during the game’s first four minutes and opened the second period with three consecutive turnovers as Bexley built a 19-7 lead.

The Lions, who led 26-14 at the half, got a pair of steals from senior guard Mikayla Williams that she turned into layups during the first half.

“We’re kind of a senior-dominated team right now,” Williams said. “We’ve been together since seventh or eighth grade. We basically played six years of our basketball careers with each other.

"(Against Granville) we were the underdogs. When we did get a steal, we would go down and score. Every time we had a breakaway or a caused turnover, we just built another play on top of it.”

Bexley closed the first half on a 7-0 run and scored the first five points of the third quarter to build a 31-14 lead. The Lions’ first basket of the second half was a steal by Williams that she turned into a layup.“We talked all week and the two days we had to prepare for them about ball pressure because they like to throw lobs into (senior forward Harper Annarino),” Baugh said. “We said the best thing was to put ball pressure on them, and when they tried to throw those lob passes in there, it was much more difficult than I’d seen on film. They had problems getting the ball in there because of our ball pressure. We had to make sure we guarded people.”

Annarino, who entered averaging 18 points and nine rebounds, was held to a pair of free throws in the second half and eight points overall.

The Blue Aces, who scored all of their points in the third quarter on free throws and fell behind by as much as 23 during the final period, have high aspirations for the postseason after returning three starters and six letterwinners.

“We have to get better because of this,” Granville head coach Tate Moore said. “We have to use it as a wakeup call. It didn’t affect goal No. 1, which was to win a league title, and it didn’t affect goal No. 2, which was to win a district title, but let’s not act like that’s not an embarrassing moment for us. They punched us in the mouth.

“We lost earlier in the year to Watterson and came out of it and played some of our best basketball. It was the same type of game with Watterson where it was physical and they pushed us around. The key is how are we going to respond to this?”