Lady Hornets advance with easy win, Round Mountain next

Senior Lexi Gil’s 28 points helped the Lady Hornets easily defeat Word of Life, 65-28, in the Class 1A Southern Region quarterfinal game on Wednesday at Beatty.

“We played a good, fast game,” Hornets coach Aimee Senior said. “We had a lot of steals and scored off the fast breaks. We need to continue this momentum into Friday, and our defense needs to step up, and our offense needs to shoot the ball. If we can keep calm and play our game, we’ll give Round Mountain a good game.”

Gil said her team got a lot of turnovers and capitalized on them.

“We helped each other a lot,” she said. “We would steal the ball and then drive down for the layup and that’s how we scored a lot of our points.”

With the win, Beatty (12-6 overall, 5-2 Class 1A Southern) advances to the Class 1A semifinals on Friday at Sunrise Mountain High School. The Lady Hornets will play Round Mountain, who had a bye as the second seed (14-6, 6-1), at 3 p.m.

Round Mountain just played Beatty in their last regular game of the season, beating the Hornets 47-29. The Hornets had a hard time in that game containing the Knights’ lead scorer, Alyssa Hanks, who scored 28 points.

Senior said her team has to stop her to win the upcoming playoff game. Another key to that game would be Gil getting double digits in scoring for the Hornets, along with Granados and Karina Villanueva. Granados also has to have a double-digit game in rebounds. She had 13 in the game against the Eagles.

The Knights held Gil to just four points on Feb. 10.

Beatty stats:

Karina Villanueva 13 points, Andrea Leon 8, Granados 5, Angie Altman 4, Jasmin Pelayo 3 (last shot of the game at the buzzer). Arianna Oseguera and Jasmine Chau each had 2.

Contact sports editor Vern Hee at vhee@pvtimes.com