Lady Cougars Go 1-1 in Tourney

Piedmont Academy’s varsity girls basketball team went .500 in a tournament hosted by John Milledge Academy this past weekend.

The Lady Cougars fell to Central Fellowship 51-44 on Friday before defeating Trinity Christian 78-67 on Saturday.

Piedmont is now 7-2 overall for the season.

“I thought we had a pretty good weekend overall,” said coach Michael Wilson. “We are heading in the right direction. We need to shore up a couple of details with our defense and we need to rebound better. We have an overall rebounding edge on the year but we aren’t rebounding as we have in the past. We are going to spend Christmas practices getting better in this area.”

It was the second close loss to CFCA this season for Piedmont.

“We had our chances against them,” Wilson said. “They did a really good job defending our three primary scorers and pressuring the basketball but in the end I think it’s a loss we can chalk up to poor shooting. They are a very good team, I think we are better but ultimately they have done the little things in our games against each other this year to win. “

Sarah Ellen Stroud led Piedmont with 17 points, four rebounds, four assists, three steals and two blocks. Kylee Keck added 13 points and six rebounds.

“You can probably credit some to their defense but we had less turnovers in the game and more transition points than they had,” Wilson said. “Ultimately, we were 15% from 3-point range and 21% overall. We had good looks, we just didn’t make them.”

Marissa Holder was held to seven points although she did have 14 rebounds, seven steals, six assists and one block.

“They hurt us in the paint,” Wilson said. “We have to stop the drive before it gets to the lane. We are still struggling with playing aggressively and staying in our areas. I love our guards challenging the other guards but they’ve got to recover and we’ve got to get the middle of our zone to step up and stop the drive. When you play good teams like CFCA and don’t cut the lane, you’re lucky to keep it respectable.”

Emily Whitwell added six points for the Lady Cougars with five rebounds, one assist and one steal.

Piedmont was able to get back on the winning side against Trinity on Saturday.

“Kylee and Marissa shot the ball amazingly,” their coach said. “Sarah Ellen had nine assists and four steals and did a great job of moving the ball to our hot shooters. Those two were 14-of-27 from three and ended the game with 25 and 36 respectively.

In addition to 36 points, Holder had 13 total boards with nine steals and five assists. Keck had right rebounds and a steal in addition to her 25 points.

“I thought we showed some grit in this one,” Wilson said. “We were up 54-39 in the third and for whatever reason we ended up with three starters who had four fouls before the end of the quarter. Give Trinity credit, they made 13-of-18 of their free throws in the last four minutes of the third quarter and got back in the game. I was proud of the girls in the fourth. They came out and played really good defense and were very efficient on offense. Both of these games were very close and to only commit two turnovers in each of the fourth quarters is definitely a positive and a lot of the reason for our successes in recent years.”

Piedmont will play Robert Toombs on Friday at 3 p.m. in a tournament hosted by Brentwood.