With a seven-game win streak snapped, the Olympic High School girls basketball team on Friday will enter its most difficult game of the season on a down note.
The Lady Trojans (13-5 overall, 11-3 league) couldn’t overcome an 18-point halftime deficit in a 53-49 loss at Kingston on Tuesday, the team’s first loss since it fell Jan. 8 to the same Lady Buccaneers team.
Now Olympic heads to Port Angeles (16-2, 14-0), undefeated at home in league play and winners of 12 consecutive games, looking to get back on track before the postseason.
Port Angeles has clinched the regular-season league championship.
“In a way it was good for us to play from behind because we hadn’t played a game like that for awhile,” Olympic coach Laurie Shaw said. “It proved to the girls that if they play like they did in the second half, they can run with anybody.”
To run with Port Angeles, whose only loss to a Class 3A team this season was against Mount Si High School in a non-league contest in the middle of December, the Lady Trojans will need a balanced offensive effort.
An evenly spread scoring attack has been a strength all season for the Lady Trojans, who have four players averaging between 9.5 and 10.3 points per game.
Jalyn Halstead is the team’s leading scorer at 10.3 — she scored 15 points Tuesday and 25 against Port Townsend last week — followed by defensive specialist Riza Suriben (9.9), Jessica Klump (9.8) and Samantha Thornton (9.5).
Shaw will look to that quartet when the team faces Port Angeles Friday.
“They need to have it in their minds that if they play their game, they can play with them,” Shaw said.
Although a victory over the Lady Roughriders would be huge for confidence, the game is essentially irrelevant to the league standings and playoff seeding.
Olympic has clinched the No. 2 seed to the 3A Olympic League tournament and will host the No. 3 seed, either Bremerton High School or North Kitsap High School, Feb. 19. The winner of that game becomes the league’s No. 2 seed to the sub-district tournament, earning a home game against the No. 3 team from the Western Cascade Conference in a loser-out match.
The team was in the same situation last season, losing in sub-dsitricts to Timberline High School. Olympic ends the regular season at home against Sequim High School at 7 p.m. Feb. 16.
