Posted on November 24, 2016.
By Thomas Sellers Jr.
The TRA Lady Rebels have a bright future featuring young player not even sophomores.
The debut of Cameron Pridemore as a head coach was going well as his Tipton-Rosemark Academy Lady Rebels jumped out to a 13-6 lead after 8 minutes. But Pridemore knew his team still needed to settle down against Macon Road last Thursday night. Once the roster full of youthful Lady Rebels calm down, the TRA Gymnasium scoreboard started to flip over on the home side to the total of 73 points leading to a 73-25 win. “It feels very good,” Pridemore said of victory No. 1. “I’m especially happy for these girls. They played really hard. As eighth graders and ninth graders, they really stepped up and work hard. I’m happy for entire team. “We settled in,” he added. “In the first quarter we had a lot of first game jitters. We kind of started settling in there. I told them at the beginning of the first quarter, ‘We’re playing really hard but we’re not finding that middle ground between playing hard and smart at the same time.’” The more intelligent play started with point guard Brittany Hall. She located weapons like Abby West and Megan Sanfratello in the first quarter to jump out 13-6. The Lady Rebels missed a few layups in the opening period and looked lost on defense at times. But the second quarter TRA ran the offensive more smoothly and used press defense to create turnovers. Those Macon Road miscues and errors led to breakaways for TRA’s Jordan Allen and the Hall Sisters Brittany and Brianna. Most of the steals were created by West using her long arms. West was rewarded for her defense with a layup making the score 22-9. Sanfratello drained a triple in the period to make the score 25-11. TRA outscored Macon Road 12-4 the rest of the first half with buckets from Brianna, West and Neely Turner. The Lady Rebels’ 37-15 halftime lead grew to 61-18 by the end of the third quarter. Kallie Alexander sparked TRA with a put-back basket in the early moments of the quarter. Later Brittany drove to the rim and fired a laser to Alexander for a bucket to make the score 55-17. The elder Hall concluded the period driving to the rim for a layup. TRA outscored Macon Road 12-7 in the fourth quarter with Lady Rebel freshman Eva McIntosh scoring 4 points. Eighth grader Jordan Allen added a bucket in final moments. “Anytime you can get a win with a young team it’s good,” Pridemore said. “It gives them more confidence. Any opportunity to gain more confidence for them is good right now. For them to see that they can do this, that their work leads to results. We had some girls step up and do really well tonight.” With eighth graders and freshmen making up half the roster full of non-seniors, Pridemore said his first victory as TRA Head Coach could be the start of something special. “It’s a really good group that they get along already,” he said. “As small of a school where we’re at, they’ve known each other for a long time already. This might be the fist time they’re playing together, but they all know each other. We even have three sets of sisters playing together. They’ve grown up together.
“They really do like each other,” Pridemore concluded. “They’re hanging out together and organizing time together without me putting together. Once that starts carrying over to the floor the more they play together, I think there could be something really special there.”
