Girls basketball beats Lawndale 56-55

Samo girls basketball beat Lawndale High School by a hair on Jan. 15 with a final score of 55-56. The game was a huge disappointment to Lawndale fans—after staying comfortably behind Samo for the majority of the game, Lawndale made a huge comeback in the last five minutes, just barely coming up short. Had the game been a minute longer, Lawndale would likely have won.While it wasn’t a pretty victory, the Lady Vikings played excellently and with significantly more communication and coherence as a team than they had previously this season. Head coach Marissa Silvestri credits this maturity to the extra hours of practice the girls have put in this week.“They’ve been doing a great job implementing the stuff we’ve been working on in practice in a game situation.” Silvestri said. “I think they’ve been making huge strides and it really showed tonight.”Both teams seemed to be fairly evenly matched in terms of ball handling and running plays, but Samo’s defense really set it apart from Lawndale. Samo stuck to an aggressive help side structure with the posts lingering in the key and the guards generally ensuring that the posts didn’t get any action.“Our defense has come a long way,” Silvestri said. “And I think the defensive effort by our guard Corrie Kim [(’16)] was amazing.”Kim’s defensive aggression especially stood out—her enthusiasm seemed to rally the rest of the team in their fourth period slump.“It was pretty stressful,” Kim said. “Our defense wasn’t tight enough in the fourth quarter but we finally began pulling off the help-side defense and ultimately we got the win.”In nearly every game this season, the team has started out very strong and then lost energy throughout. Luckily, this seems to be happening increasingly late in the games and this time Samo was able to hold onto its lead long enough to secure a victory. According to forward Carmen Donate (’18), this happens partly because of exhaustion and partly because of complacency .“The other team gained a lot of momentum in the last quarter because we thought we were up by a lot more than we were,” Donate said. “Things started to fall apart for a little while but they worked out. It was a good game.”This game was absolutely a step in the right direction for Samo. Hopefully their luck will continue as they begin Ocean League.“We’re starting to learn how to win,” Silvestri said. “We just need to do that a little earlier in the game.”