HOWELL — Late in the first half, lying on the floor holding her left ankle, Lexie Miller wanted only one thing.
“I didn’t want it to be broken,” she said. “I tape my ankles before every game to make sure I don’t twist my ankle. It hurt really bad (at first), and then I was relieved when I could finally move it.”
She eventually walked off the floor unassisted, had her ankle retaped and asked to go back into the game.
“It was too late,” she said, smiling. “There were only eight seconds left in the half.”
Relieved, Miller and the Highlanders survived an aggressive Brighton push in the first half by taking over in the second en route to a 51-45 victory.
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The win wrapped up an 11-1 Gold Division season for the Highlanders, who are now 15-2 overall. Brighton (12-5, 8-3) fell to third place in the league.
“We got a little frazzled, but we brought it together and were able to calm things down,” Howell coach Tim Olszewski said. “They focused not on the officials, not on the crowd, but on what was important out on the court.”
Brighton overcame its share of adversity, losing center Sophie Dziekan at the 5:20 mark of the first quarter when she picked up her second foul. She did not return until the second half.
But the Bulldogs, playing an aggressive defense and moving faster on offense, stayed with the Highlanders, in part due to point guard Laura Brown, who had eight of her 10 points in the first half.
“We’ve been on her a little big about being more of a scorer,” Brighton coach Paul Ash said. “Tonight, she took that challenge. So that was good to see, no question.”
It was the second meeting of the season between the teams, but not likely the last, a prospect that did not excite Ash.
“We only have two weeks to get better,” he said, referring to the district tournament at Howell, “so we have to make the best of those two weeks. We closed a gap. We lost by 17 (the first meeting) and tonight we lost by six. We’ve still got a ways to go.”
Senior Dana Schmanske, who held Miller in check much of the game while playing defense, was upbeat afterward.
“I think they made a couple of big shots, and we missed a couple of big shots, too,” she said. “It’s definitely encouraging, knowing we have some work to do, but we’ll get there.”
The difference, Olszewski said, came on defense in the second half.
“We tried to up the pressure a little bit,” he said. “We tried to create a tempo that was a little more favorable to us. We pressed a little more and we tried things to get some energy going, and the next thing you know, we hit a couple of shots off the defensive end. The girls did a gret job executing what we wanted to do defensively, and that translated to better opportunities offensively.”
Howell’s Leah Weslock had some difficulty cutting her piece of the net after the game, to her teammates’ amusement, but this came after she had scored a game-high 18 points, including going 8-for-8 at the free-throw line.
“It feels great,” she said of wrapping up the division crown. “It give us a lot of motivation for our next games and championships to win.”
The KLAA tournament begins on Friday. Matchups will be determined after Wednesday’s makeup games in the KLAA Black Division.
