Rampart’s Nicea Eliely (13) receives a pass during the first half of Friday’s win against Pine Creel (Dan Mohrmann/CHSAANow)
COLORADO SPRINGS — The Pine Creek faithful tried to force Thalia Buckley to rush her shot.
The junior guard kept search for her teammate, Nicea Eliely. Eliely wasn’t open. But a look at the basket was.
Buckley squared up and fired off a 3-pointer that fell in the hoop, giving Rampart girls basketball a 54-51 win over the rival Eagles on Friday.
“That’s not the play we drew up,” Rams coach Ashley Miller said. “But I’ll take that kid shooting a three any day of the week.”
The win was anything but easy for Rampart (16-4 overall, 9-0 5A Colorado Springs Metro League). The key for Pine Creek was to limit the damage that senior Cassidy Budge could cause on offense. In the first quarter, their man-to-man defense limited Budge to one shot, which she missed.
On the offensive side of the ball, the Eagles were able to distribute their scoring and build a 16-12 lead after the first quarter.
“We came in knowing that we had to ramp it up,” Eagles coach Kelley Stewart said. “We were coming into a contentious place to play and we got our (butts) kicked the first time we played them and our kids were not going to allow that to happen again.”
It didn’t take long at the start of the second quarter to get Budge involved offensively. She scored the first basket of the quarter, which helped spark the Rams into making a 13-4 run to take a 25-20 lead. Budge, who finished with nine points, ignited the spark, but it was Eliely who would fuel the fire most of the night for the Rams.
“I changed my mentality from knowing that it’s not always going to be just one person scoring,” Eliely said. “I knew Cassidy wasn’t feeling well so I took it upon myself to take it to the basket.”
But the Eagles found their offensive rhythm in the final two minutes and a 3-pointer from Jade Odom at the buzzer sent the game to halfitme with Pine Creek leading 30-27. When Stewart got her team into the locker room she stressed that the Rams wouldn’t quit and they would continue to fight.
“When we went in off that, we knew we couldn’t come out comfortable,” Stewart said. “We knew we had to play to win and not play to not lose.”
Eliely’s assault on the basket proved to be too much for the Eagles to counter. With the Rams trailing by six near the end of the third quarter, she scored two baskets to pull her team to within two.
Down two in the fourth quarter she once again scored two buckets, this time giving her team a two-point lead. A free throw from Victoria Mondy extended the lead to 51-48.
Pine Creek once again sought Odom to take the big shot and she knocked down another 3-pointer to tie the game at 51 going into the last minute. Miller took time to draw up the final play for team, only the situation didn’t go exactly as planned.
“The play was to pass it to Nicea, but she wasn’t open,” Buckley said. “I just heard in my mind ‘do not force it’ and I noticed I was open so I figured if I missed we would go to overtime anyway.”
But there was no miss. And there was no overtime. For Rampart, it was a big win over a rival and the kind of game that could propel them through the playoffs.
“It gives us a lot of energy,” Eliely said. “We know we can beat them and we know that they’re not better than us.”