By Rich Stevens
Sissonville senior Madison Jones ended the first night of the West Virginia high school girls state basketball tournament in grand style, hitting a 15-foot jump shot just before the buzzer to lift the defending Class AA champion Indians to a 47-45 victory over Summers County on Wednesday at the Charleston Civic Center.
The Indians (24-2), admittedly bitter upon being the No. 4 feed, overcame a night of opportunities to take advantage of one.
After Summers (22-3) turned the ball over for the 17th time in the final minute, the Indians worked the clock to 13.7 seconds before calling a timeout.
Jones, the program’s all-time leading scorer, took possession and stayed in the backcourt until wheeling around teammate Karli Pinkerton. Two Summers defenders inexplicably followed Pinkerton. Jones took advantage, finding an open spot to score her 13th point and give Sissonville its sixth victory in seven state tournament games since 2014.
The Indians, admittedly upset about receiving the No. 4 seed, face top-seeded Wyoming East in the Class AA semifinals at 1 p.m. on Friday. Sissonville beat the Warriors 50-47 in the 2015 championship.
“I think being here … our seventh game in three seasons here … I think experience got us through that,” Sissonville coach Rich Skeen said. “Madison works so hard that she deserves to hit a shot like that.
“We were supposed to clear out after the screen and get out of her way and it looked like we had three Summers County jerseys guarding her and two white jerseys guarding her. She had five people on her. Madison just kept her head.”
Jones called it, “a football play.”
Pinkerton said, “it was a fake handoff. I was just calling for the ball and pretty much I went toward Madison. It was a football play.”
It was a dramatic end to a game that saw two teams combine to hit just 35 of 104 shots. Sissonville, which lost in the title game in 2014 before defeating Wyoming East in overtime last season, was 18-61 led by Pinkerton with 14. Brooke Reed had 10.
Brittney Justice had 18 to lead coach Wayne Ryan’s Bobcats, who won five consecutive state titles from 2007-11.
“I’ll have to watch the film and really break it down, but I think they didn’t switch off and both got caught,” Ryan said of the Summers defense on the game’s final shot. “Every missed shot that we had. In a game like that you can take 25 possessions on offense and 25 on defense, but the one at the end gets magnified.”
