FARMINGDALE — Weather-related postponements and a scheduled off-week over the holiday break left the Carrabec girls basketball team with a full 14 days between games. The Cobras needed little time to shake off any rust.
Sophomore Aislynn Slate scored a career-high 23 points and classmate Cheyenne Cahill added 20 of her own as Carrabec broke open a close game at halftime en route to a 55-40 win over Hall-Dale in a Mountain Valley Conference game Thursday night.
The Cobras (4-2) have now won four of their last five after entering the night third in the Class C South standings. Hall-Dale (2-5), by contrast, has lost four of its last five.
“(Slate) stepped up tonight,” Carrabec coach Skip Rugh said. “Huge. She’s come a long way. She was a swinger last year, toward the end of the year she started making a difference for us.
“She works hard.”
Tied 15-15 at the halftime break, Carrabec went on a 9-0 run to open the third quarter. Cahill’s 3-pointer from the top of the key helped ignite the run, and a pair of Skye Welch free throws capped the run.
“We have to be able to go fast in order to see the cuts really quickly to get the open looks,” Cahill said. “Chaos is what we like.”
“We started to press a little bit, and it seems to get them going,” Rugh said. “That’s why we do it. It put a little pressure on and we got some turnovers. When we went in at halftime, we felt like we were playing their game. We had to change the tempo a little bit.”
Hall-Dale scored six of the final eight points of the period to cut the deficit to 30-25 through 24 minutes.
But Carrabec picked up where it had started the second half, with a 7-0 run that left the Bulldogs chasing the rest of the way.
The increased pace flustered Hall-Dale, which committed 24 turnovers on the night. Five of those came on the Bulldogs’ first five possessions of the final quarter.
“I think we started to play a little more frantic than fast,” Hall-Dale coach Jarod Richmond said. “We were starting to force some things we weren’t forcing early. We talked about the first three minutes of the second half, and that’s where Carrabec kind of took the game over a little bit. We were chasing that.”
The Cobras made 13 of 16 free throws in the fourth quarter to seal the victory. Slate scored her team’s final 11 points, including seven from the charity stripe.
“I always have my teammates coming up to me telling me I can do it, telling me that it’s going to be OK,” Slate said of her foul-shooting down the stretch. “I think that’s what makes me make more of those shots.”
Slate scored eight of Carrabec’s 15 first-half points against a stingy Hall-Dale defense for a Cobra team looking for a rhythm.
“I wasn’t counting my shots. I wasn’t keeping track,” Slate said. “When coach told me I had 23, I was so excited and happy just to help the team.”
And just like that, Carrabec shook off a long layoff and looked very much like they hadn’t had much of a break at all.
“I was a little nervous about it, but I just had to put it past me after the first half,” Cahill said. “That was … rough.”
Freshman Amanda Trepanier led Hall-Dale with 15 points, while K.K. Wills finished with nine.
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