Defending champion Holy Innocents’ used 12-0 runs at the start of the second and third quarters to take control of the Class A private-school girls basketball championship game and knocked off top-ranked St. Francis 66-53 Wednesday at the Macon Centreplex.
Third-ranked Holy Innocents’, which captured its fourth state title overall, won its final 16 games of the season to finish 26-5. More important, the Golden Bears were 4-0 against the three other top teams in the classification, beating No. 4 Wesleyan twice during the regular season and No. 2 Hebron Christian and St. Francis in the final two games of the playoffs.
Naja Reeves scored four points and Rachel Suttle and Jada Farrell had three points each in the 12-0 run to start the second quarter that turned a 16-15 deficit into a 27-16 lead that the Golden Bears would not surrender.
The Golden Bears’ third-quarter run gave them their biggest lead of the game, 43-27 on a layup by Jillian Hollingshead with 4:01 to play in the period.
St. Francis fought its way back into the game after each run but was never able to pull back even. The Knights cut the second-quarter deficit to four points by halftime and got within four points again early in the fourth quarter on a layup by Savannah Samuel, but Holy Innocents’ pulled away over the final six minutes.
Suttle was 8-for-8 from the free-throw line in the fourth quarter and 11-for-12 for the game. She finished with 19 points, nine rebounds, two assists and three steals. Farrell led Holy Innocents’ with 21 points, and Hollingshead had 11 points and 14 rebounds.
St. Francis led 16-15 after one quarter, thanks in large part to a 14-6 rebounding advantage. Holy Innocents’ more than held its own in the final three quarters, however, outrebounding the Knights 33-20 the rest of the way.
“A big thing we said was we had to mash the physicality,” Holy Innocents’ coach Nichole Dixon said. “That means we had to limit their offensive rebounds. We did an OK job in the first half but not nearly as good as we wanted to do. So we had to take charges. Rachel Suttle did a fantastic job pulling boards, most of them that she got were defensive rebounds to limit their offensive boards. Jada Farrell took three charges, which is almost unheard of in today’s game. And then Rachel went to the free-throw line and kinda solidified it.
“So every time St. Francis would get a run, somebody’d get a big board and they would come at us with their tough defense and foul us and we’d just go to the line and knock down free throws.”
Samuel and Mia Moore finished with 11 points each to lead St. Francis (28-4), which was seeking its first state championship since 2016.
“I’m very proud of our girls,” Dixon said. “This year we’ve faced some adversity. Cierra Foster tore her ACL. We had a kid that had a concussion and wasn’t able to come back, she’s still out, and then we had a kid that moved to Colorado. It was adversity that kind of hit us when school began. We had spent all summer kind of excited about what we had. The really cool thing about the girls is they bought in. They said, ‘You know what? Cierra’s gonna be back.’ At the time we didn’t know that we had lost Logan [Jackson] for the year. So they just went to work with that.”
St. Francis - 16-11-13-13 - 53
Holy Innocents’ - 15-16-17-18 - 66
St. Francis (53): Morgan Harper 8, Amirah Abdur-Rahim 9, Mia Moore 11, Savannah Samuel 11, Kennedi Philson 6, Trynce Taylor 8, Ryin Tillis, Jade Sutters, Erica Moon.
Holy Innocents' (66): Rachel Suttle 19, Naja Reeves 6, Olivia Hutcheson 8, Jada Farrell 21, Jillian Hollingshead 11, Ellie Crosswell, Cierra Foster 1, Charlsie Birkle, Omari Foote.
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