(Dan Mohrmann/CHSAANow.com)
COLORADO SPRINGS — Palmer senior Bailey Smith couldn’t have picked a better time to improve her team’s free throw percentage.
She sank all six of her fourth quarter shots from the charity stripe to help the Terrors seal a 41-26 win over Rock Canyon in the first round of the girls Class 5A state playoffs.
“I just know that my team needed me and needed those free throws,” Smith said. “We were struggling there so my focus was that we needed these in order to survive.”
And survive they did, despite going 18-34 as a team from the free-throw line.
The 8th-seeded Terrors (10-14 overall) will now travel to Lakewood to face the Tigers who are the top seed in the Alice Barron region of the state tournament.
The Jaguars (7-17) are now tasked with turning an eye to next season, something that will have to come once they’re over the shock of this season coming to an end on the road.
“(I tell them) that we keep working,” Rock Canyon coach Becky Mudd said. “This group has done a great job of buying in all year to the idea that we’re going to be a team and we’re going to work together.”
That exactly how the Jaguars were able to hang with Palmer through the duration of the game. They fell behind early, but kept chipping away at Palmer’s lead, doing everything they could to completely close the gap.
Going into the fourth quarter, the Terrors held a 29-20 lead, but Rock Canyon quickly cut the lead to five thanks to field goals from Katie DiDonna and Julia Doherty. DiDonna led the Jaguars with 10 points on the night.
The run was stopped by Abi Torres-Drozd who connected on her first field goal since the first quarter to give Palmer a 31-24 lead, killing any momentum for Rock Canyon.
Torres-Drozd scored 10 of her game-high 13 points in the first quarter before going cold for the rest of the game.
“I was just kind of going for it,” she said. “I was just playing the game I love, I wasn’t thinking about the game itself so much, I was just going out there and doing my best.”
Palmer would add 10 more points to their total and limit Rock Canyon to only two free throws from DiDonna to come away with a win.
In any one-and-done format, the first win is always the most crucial and Palmer coach Dave Shackelford was very aware of that being the case Tuesday night, even if he knew the Terrors’ win was a tad uglier than he would like to see.
“It is (nice to win the first one), no matter how it’s done,” he said. “Abi was a big part of that as her first five or seven points were a big key for us to start. It was steady after that until Bailey stepped up and hit those free throws.”
Palmer will get back to work on Wednesday and will have two full days of practice before their second round game with the Tigers. Even after the win Tuesday night, the Terrors know they have their work cut out for them.
“We need to be tighter on defense,” Smith said. “There’s a few offensive plays that we need to start working and we need to limit our turnovers and work on some fundamentals.”