Lady Indians down North Adams for Classic title

By Mark Carpenter

People’s Defender

Coming into the 2023 Holiday Classic at Manchester High School, many observers felt that the most competitive game of the entire slate would be a girls championship match up between Peebles and North Adams. After all, the two teams had already met twice in December, splitting two games on their respective home courts. After garnering easy wins in the Classic semis, the hoped-for match up took place on Friday night, the third battle on a third different battleground.

Since the two teams had split their previous meetings, there was no real favorite going into Friday’s contest, but it was the Lady Indians who took the reins early and put together a wire-to-wire performance and made it two out of three over their county rivals, capturing the Classic championship by a final count of 50-41.

“Tonight may have been the best we have looked all year,” said a raspy-voiced Peebles head coach Sidney Pell in her postgame radio interview. “When you see a team three times that soon, you have to do some different things and we did on offense tonight and they seemed to work out pretty well for us. We played really well defensively tonight too, which may have won the game for us. We’re really excited to win this tournament.”

Coach Pell’s Lady Indians made a dominant statement early in the game, about as dominant as it can get as they scored the first 10 points of the game from the 6:30 to the 3:56 mark of the opening frame. Peebles got a start with a basket by eventual Tournament MVP Payton Johnson, then a score inside from Caydence Carroll. That was followed up by Abigail Smalley dialing long distance and later adding a free throw, and when Lydia Maddox scored on a putback, North Adams was staring up at a quick 10-0 deficit. Luckily for the Lady Devils, they held Peebles scoreless for the reminder of the quarter, but were only able to get one score of their own, a three-point goal by Kenlie Jones with 3:22 left in the first.

The second quarter began with Johnson draining a three-pointer, before the Lady Devils finally put together back-to-back scores, one from Tatum Grooms and one from Katelynn Boerger, cutting the gap to 13-7 and it was “game on”. With 3:45 left in the first half, Johnson grabbed a long rebound and went coast to coast for a layup to put Peebles up 17-8, but that was followed by a North Adams run that fans of the Lady Devils have come to expect. Coach Rob Davis’s squad reeled off eight straight, including three-pointers from Jones and Taylor Shelton, and suddenly it was a one-point game at 17-16.

AS the excitement began to murmur through a packed house, Johnson answered with another three-ball and then another of her patented drives to the basket for two and at the halftime break, the Lady Indians were on top 22-16.

Early in the third quarter, Johnson hit from beyond the arc again, giving her team a 27-18 advantage. North Adams stayed within striking distance with a driving basket by Jones and two Grooms free throws, but they just couldn’t seem to get a defensive stop when they needed one, mainly because they had no answer for the offensive exploits of Payton Johnson. A basket by the Rio Grande-bound senior stretched the Peebles lead to double digits, 33-23 at the end of three periods of play.

The story of the final eight minutes was the Lady Devils doing everything they could to slice into the deficit, while the Lady Indians just continued to do what they needed to do to maintain their advantage. Two Smalley free throws extended the Peebles lead to 12 and later two from the stripe from younger sister Alyssa kept the lead at 37-25 as time was beginning to run out on the defending Classic champions from North Adams.

With 3:55 to play, Jones drilled another three-ball to pull the Lady Devils within 39-32, but Johnson got back to the foul line, where she is nearly automatic, and swished a pair to put the lead at nine. With under three minutes to go in regulation, a basket by Boerger and a nice driving reverse layup by Grooms brought North Adams’ hopes back to the forefront as they trailed just 41-36, but the Lady Indians continued to stifle the comeback attempts.

With 1:31 left, Johnson performed her magic again, driving, scoring, drawing the foul and hitting the freebie for the old-fashioned three-point play that made it 48-40 and the Peebles faithful could seriously sense a Classic championship coming their way. The Lady Devils got a free from from Mckenna Shelton but with 1_02 left, Coach Pell used a timeout and set up an out-of-bounds play that worked to perfection, resulting in the game’s final basket, an easy layup for Caydence Carroll and a 50-41 title game win for an exuberant group of Lady Indians.

Though everyone gears their defense to stop her, no one seems to be able to do it and that was the story again in this girls’ title game, as Peebles’ Payton Johnson sliced her way through the North Adams defense on her way to a game-high 28 points. Added to her 24 points in a semi-final win over West Union, the Lady Indians’s senior guard was an obvious choice for the Classic MVP Award. Abigail Smalley scored 8 points in the championship win and also earned a spot on the All-Tournament Team. The Lady Indians also got 6 points each from Lydia Maddox and Caydence Carroll as they improved their overall season mark to 7-2, winning their third in a row since a December 14 loss at North Adams.

With the title game defeat, the Lady Devils fell to 6-3 on the year and they were led in scoring by senior Kenlie Jones with 16 points, earning her spot on the All-Tournament Team. Tatum Grooms added 8 and was also tabbed for the All-Tourney Team.

The Lady Indians will be back in Southern Hills Athletic Conference action on January 4 with a road trip to Whiteoak, while North Adams will be in non-conference play the same night, hosting Miami Trace, before coming back on Saturday to visit Eastern Brown in SHAC action. At press time, the race for the girls big school division was a tight one, with Lynchburg at 5-1, North Adams at 4-1 and Peebles at 4-2.

Peebles

10 12 11 17 —50

North Adams

3 13 7 18 —41

Peebles (50): Maddox 2 2-4 6, Alyssa Smalley 0 2-2 2, Johnson 9 7-9 28, Abigail Smalley 2 3-4 8, Carroll 3 0-0 6, Team 16 14-19 50.

N. Adams (41): M. Shelton 0 1-4 1, Grooms 3 2-3 8, Kennedy 0 1-2 1, Boerger 3 0-0 6, brand 2 0-0 4, Jones 6 1-2 16, T. Shelton 2 0-0 5, Team 16 5-11 41.

Three-Point Goals:

Peebles(4)- Johnson 3, Smalley 1

N. Adams (4)- Jones 3, T. Shelton 1