Sports
Lady Bulldogs Clinch TVC-Ohio
< < Back to lady-bulldogs-clinch-tvc-ohioThe Athens Lady Bulldogs defeated Vinton County in McArthur Thursday, 63-42. Dominique Doseck led the Green and Gold with 14 points and eight assists on the way to an outright TVC-Ohio Championship.
“It’s really sweet for (the players),” Athens head coach Wayne Horsley said after the game. “The girls are competitors, they are winners…they understood the ramifications of this game, and they looked forward to it. We were ready to play this game Tuesday.”
Horsley got a balanced team performance from start to finish Tursday night, as five different players scored eight or more points. Hannah DeBruin scored 12 points off the bench while Doseck added four steals and five rebounds to her near double-double performance.
“(Doseck) gets all the attention, all the focus…but the other girls feed off of her, and they are big game players,” said Horsley.
Athens took advantage of a sluggish first quarter by the Lady Vikings to establish an early lead and never trailed in the game. When Vinton County used a big second quarter to cut the deficit to four points at half time, Athens came out of the locker room and put the game out of reach in the third.
“We kind of patched a hole where (Vinton County) was exploiting our zone defense, and I though once we did that, we really gave them problems,” Horsley said of the adjustments his team made at halftime.
The Lady Vikings struggled with Athens’ hybrid zone defense—a combination 2-3, 3-2 look where Emma Stanley’s rotation spanned from the top of the key to the paint. Vinton County was able to find open looks periodically by spreading the ball, but the Lady Vikings missed the vast majority of their shots; as a team, Vinton County shot just 16-of-54 from the field (30 percent).
Stanley was key inside with eight points and 13 rebounds on the night, while Elyse Lutz and Olivia Harris rounded out the perimeter game with 11 and 10 points, respectively. Emily Zinn was the high scorer for Vinton County with nine points on 3-of-12 shooting, and Caitlyn Owings added eight points and four assists.
With the win in McArthur, Athens clinched an outright TVC-Ohio championship, beating out Vinton County (7-2 TVC-Ohio) with one league game to play. A season ago, Athens shared a league title with the Lady Vikings after the two schools split home victories in the season series. That was Athens’ last TVC-Ohio loss.
“That was a big motivation (coming in),” Doseck said of Athens’ Dec. 8, 2011 loss at Vinton County. “We wanted to outright win the TVC, and it was a great feeling to win it.”