Socastee girls battle but fall short against Sumter

The Socastee girls basketball team put itself in good shape to pull off an upset of Sumter on Friday.

Unfortunately for the Braves, they wouldn’t stay in that position very long.

Socastee trailed the Gamecocks by just one at halftime, but Sumter put together a solid defensive second-half performance en route to a 48-31 win over the Braves in the Region VI-AAAA finale.

“First of all, I thought we played a really patient, calculated first half. Then we came out in the second half and [Sumter] turned up the heat defensively, and we didn’t handle it very well,” Socastee coach Ginger Ford said. “Sumter is a really solid basketball team. With a one-point lead at halftime, they’re not going to just say, ‘We’re not going to come out and play.’ But they really turned up the heat and I thought we still played hard. It was just too big of a deficit to overcome.”

The Braves entered the contest with a five-game winning streak and a lot of momentum, which showed early as they outscored Sumter 12-10 in the first quarter.

But, the Gamecocks got the lead back late in the second quarter and never looked back.

Junior guard Kira Bell had a team-high 10 points, Mia Angelo scored nine and Shayla Baldwin had eight points for the Braves, who finished third in the region with a 6-4 record and will have to travel in the first round of the Class AAAA state playoffs.

“We do travel quite a bit for our region games, having to go to Florence and Sumter. We’re excited that we’re going; we’d like to be second, but we’re excited,” Ford said. “Winning five in a row, we feel like we were peaking at the right time but had the misfortune of playing the best team in the region in our last game.”

Kyra Wilson had 11 points and Jessica Harris scored 10 for Sumter, which finished the regular season strong and boasts an undefeated 10-0 record in Region VI-AAAA play.

“It’s very nice to finish on a high note; it’s one of the things that concern yourself as a coach. When you already have the region locked up before the game, sometimes your kids don’t punch in mentally out there and I thought we did a very good job. I thought we were focused,” Gamecocks coach Jason Loudenslager said. “I was very impressed with Socastee’s effort, especially in the first half. They got after it, played with purpose and pushed and challenged us. We needed that going into the playoffs. It was a good basketball game.”

Loudenslager is just glad to be entering the playoffs in the driver’s seat and hopes to work out whatever kinks his squad might have in the coming days.

“I think we’re in a pretty good spot right now,” he said. “We finished the season relatively strong, but our biggest thing is consistency sometimes. We look great sometimes and sometimes we look average. In the playoffs now, everyone plays tough basketball and starting in the first round, all bets are off. They’re going to be 50-50 games. But we put ourselves in a good situation going in, and we’ll get a couple of home playoff games if all goes well and see where we can go from there.”

And for a team that started 4-7 without two of its key players in Bell and Amber Rutledge, the Braves (13-11) have come a far way and hope to make a run now they’re at full strength.

“Being as young as we were, with two eighth-graders and two ninth-graders on the squad. Then, not having Amber Rutledge until late in the season, and Kira not coming back until the first few region games set us behind. But we moved forward at the best pace we could,” Ford said. “All of that was getting the chemistry back and I’m really proud of the girls for coming as far as we did with the obstacles we had. Finishing third is quite an accomplishment.”

This story was originally published February 12, 2016 at 10:05 PM with the headline "Socastee girls battle but fall short against Sumter."