WINSLOW — The Maranacook girls basketball team checked off a lot of boxes Tuesday night. They got out to a quick start, they shared the ball, they found options and they battled to the final buzzer.

But the Black Bears had no answer for Grace Smith.

The Winslow senior scored a game-high 22 points and grabbed nine rebounds, leading the Black Raiders to a 47-38 win over Maranacook in a Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference Class B game between two teams jockeying for seeding in their respective regions. Winslow improved to 10-5 with its second win of the season over the Black Bears, (8-7) who saw their four-game winning streak snapped.

Maranacook’s Allie LaBelle (43) and teammate Anna Drillen (20) battle for the rebound with Winslow’s Grace Smith during a Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference Class B game Tuesday in Winslow. Morning Sentinel photo by Michael G. Seamans

“We shut down on their high screen and roll, and I implored on my kids to please get on the boards and rebound,” Winslow coach Brenda Beckwith said. “I thought shutting that down a little bit helped us.”

The Black Bears raced out to a 17-12 lead after one quarter, using the inside presence of Gabrielle Green (10 points) and Amanda Goucher to get good looks and easy buckets in the first eight minutes.

After a defensive adjustment from Winslow, however, things were never quite as easy for Maranacook. Smith made sure of that.

“I feel like boxing out is kind of my thing,” Smith said. “I’m not as tall as some of their girls, but I am strong underneath. I think that really helped me out down there.”

Smith was a force in the second period, scoring nine points — including five of her 10 from the free throw line in the quarter. She created second-chance points for the Black Raiders with a total of seven offensive rebounds, many of which she used for put-backs in the paint or trips to the charity stripe.

“Grace has really stepped up her play,” Beckwith said. “She’s more like a Wiley Coyote. She’s not going to beat you with some fantastic, traditional play. She just gets the job done inside. You want her to do that, because she’s very good at it. But it is very unconventional, I’d say.”

“I thought we did a great job initially on defense, it was just that close-out,” Maranacook coach Karen Magnusson added. “If we looked at how many shots they made the first one, it was very low. It was just that second or third rebounds that got them to the line.

“But if I said we’ve got some other parts going for us, but we’ve got to rebound because that’s the difference between a win and a loss here, we’re doing some good things.”

Green and Goucher found themselves in foul trouble in the first half, and Magnusson had to manage their minutes after halftime. That hurt the offensive flow for the Black Bears significantly.

Maranacook went a stretch of more than 13 minutes from the first quarter to midway point of the third with just one field goal.

That futile spell allowed the Black Raiders — who scored a 43-30 win over Maranacook on Jan. 7 — to take a 27-20 lead into halftime and hold a 33-27 advantage through 24 minutes.

“You get in foul trouble, so there were things we had to switch a little bit,” Magnusson said. “They outscored us by nine in the second quarter, and we lost by nine. That’s 75 percent of a great game, but we just lost that momentum there.”

Grace Dwyer (eight points) hit a pair of 3-pointers in the fourth quarter that twice pulled the Black Bears to within five of Winslow, but it was as close as the visitors would get.

“We have a really good team, and we can make it really far,” Smith said. “Knowing that we can beat everyone every step along the way, that really helps us out.”

Lauren Roy added nine points for Winslow, while Bodhi Littlefield scored eight.

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