11th Region girls’ championship: Franklin County flies to another Sweet 16
Franklin County’s latest turn in the 11th Region girls’ championship game wasn’t pretty, but it ended the way so many of them have: in victory.
The Flyers defeated Lafayette 53-36 on Saturday at Eastern Kentucky University’s McBrayer Arena. They’ll meet the winner of the 13th Region championship in the first round of the Mingua Beef Jerky Girls’ Sweet Sixteen on April 7.
Patience Laster was named Tournament MVP. She scored just nine points but led a pulverizing effort on the boards by Franklin County; it finished with a 45-31 advantage, Laster accounting for 16 of them.
Franklin County was in the title round for the seventh time in the last eight years and will represent the 11th Region at state for the fifth time in that span (it lost to the eventual region champ the other three years). The Flyers were one of 10 teams that were able to play in last season’s event before it was canceled during the first round because of the COVID-19 pandemic; they fell 40-37 to Anderson County on that tournament’s first day.
The Flyers shot 16 of 44 from the field but held Lafayette to 14 of 55 shooting.
“That’s what our kids don’t understand, is how hard it is to keep doing this continuously when you’re the topic of everybody else’s conversation in this region,” Flyers Coach Joey Thacker said. “It’s not been an easy year on any of us. We played in spurts today like we have all year long, but I’m proud of these kids. They’ve really caught on, on the defense end of things the last couple weeks, really for the past month, and it’s propelled us on nights when we play as bad offensively as we did today.”
Lafayette reached the region finals for the first time since 2017 and sought its first Sweet Sixteen bid since since 2014, the last time any team from Lexington made the girls’ state tournament. The Generals’ top two scorers, Anaya Brown (18 points per game) and Lauren Walton (11.6 per game), are both juniors and the Generals will not lose any players to graduation.
How it happened
Jitters appeared to in full effect early, as both teams combined to miss their first 16 shots. Franklin County star Brooklynn Miles, who’s headed to Tennessee, took the lid off with a corner triple off a steal with 4:48 left in the opening period.
Franklin County scored the game’s next 10 points, taking a 13-0 lead into the second quarter. Lafayette missed 14 shots before Brown hit a contested layup with 6:57 left in the first half to give the Generals a number. She added a free throw 30 seconds later before Franklin’s Cameryn Ridderikhoff, an eighth-grader, answered all three points on a jumper.
Olivia Cathers connected on jumpers, one of them a three-pointer, prior to a Brown layup with 1:41 left to bring the Generals within 18-10, but Franklin County ended on a 5-0 run to close the half; Ridderikhoff connected on a second triple (from the college men’s three-point line) and Laster converted her second “and-one” layup of the afternoon.
Franklin County started the second half much stronger than it did the game. The Flyers made four of their first five shots to double their lead while Lafayette failed to get a rhythm going; the Generals shot 2-for-11 in the quarter, their only points coming on an early three-pointer from Gracyn Grantz and a layup by Lauren Walton with a little under three minutes to play.
Lafayette won the final period, 19-12, but the Generals had too much ground to make up.
This story was originally published March 27, 2021 at 4:13 PM.
