BENTON — In the huddle, in the midst of the sudden darkness, Manchester Academy girls basketball coach Emily Poe and her players made a promise.
The Mavericks led Columbus Christian Academy 26-23 just under two minutes into the second half of Saturday’s MAIS Class 2A championship game at Benton Academy, but they hadn’t been playing much like their dominant selves. Manchester was up as many as nine points at the end of the first quarter before letting the Rams sneak in and cut the lead to three.
Then the overhead lights in Benton’s gym went out. With the court shrouded in darkness, play stopped. Right away, the Mavs knew what they had to do as soon as power was restored.
“When (the lights) come back on,” they told themselves, “so do we.”
After a 10-minute delay, Lanie Potter buried a three from the right side, and Manchester dominated the remainder of the second half to end Columbus Christian’s historic season with a 52-38 final score. The Rams, who lost for just the third time all year, had never reached the state title game before Saturday.
“Every great story doesn’t end with a championship,” Columbus Christian coach Jason Williams said.
For the Rams and their seven-player senior class, this one wouldn’t. Manchester, the team that knocked Columbus Christian out of last year’s state tournament in the first round, flexed its muscle and pulled away for its 28th win of the year against just one loss.
The Mavs were unable to make it to the top last year after Potter suffered a season-ending injury in the Mavs’ south state tournament, but Poe said they made it their mission to win the title the following year. Saturday, they did.
“To see them follow through with their goals and really work hard to get there, it meant the world to me,” Poe said.
The Mavs closed the third quarter with their best stretch of the night, keeping the Rams at bay on defense and scoring at will on the other end. Ivy Sowell’s steal and layup with four seconds to go in the period put Manchester up 40-25 and earned the biggest cheer of the night from the huge home crowd that made the 12-mile trip from Yazoo City to Benton.
“We did pick up the tempo, pick up the pace and got a couple steals,” Poe said. “That put us at that 15 mark, and so we just kept staying the course.”
The Rams couldn’t make a substantial dent in the Mavs’ lead in the fourth quarter, and going 3 for 6 at the line hardly helped Columbus Christian. Junior Morgan Whitten’s late 3-pointer to cut the Manchester lead to 12 was as close as the Rams got before Manchester lifted the championship trophy.
But Williams praised Columbus Christian’s early fight after heading into the second quarter down nine. Faith Yeates, CC DeVos and Whitten all made buckets before Cayden Harding’s right-wing 3-pointer fell to make it a 21-20 game. Lily Barlow split a pair of free throws as the clock expired to keep it a three-point contest at halftime.
“I knew we weren’t going to play dead and lie down,” Williams said. “That’s not in our DNA.”
But after the Rams’ Taylor Tipton and Manchester’s Karlie Martin traded layups to begin the second half, the lights cut out with 6:07 remaining in the third. Manchester caught its breath, stretched its legs and soon pulled away for its 14-point win.
Despite Saturday’s loss, the Rams’ season isn’t over — they will open play in the MAIS overall tournament this coming week. And though Saturday didn’t end how Columbus Christian wanted it to, a hugely successful 2020-21 campaign wound up exactly where it was supposed to finish.
“This is where we wanted to be at the end of the year,” Williams said. “We came up short. We gave it all we had.”
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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