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AUGUSTA — With 52.9 seconds to go in the fourth quarter, Valley girls basketball coach Gordon Hartwell knew his team had won another state championship.

He turned around to face the Valley fans seated in the stands behind him and lifted his arms up in celebration. A year after winning their first Class D championship, the Cavaliers were about to bring a second straight Gold Ball back to Bingham, this time in Class S.

“Because the kids work so hard at it, you just want everything for them,” said Hartwell. “For me, I’ve been here, I’ve done this. But for them, this is their time … It’s not about me. All I do is stand on the side and holler. They’re the ones that have to do the work and they’re the ones that are running the drills and they’re the ones that are doing it every single day in practice.”

Valley capped a dominant run through the Class S tournament by defeating Wisdom 48-30 Saturday at the Augusta Civic Center. 

“Winning back-to-back Gold Balls is such an awesome feeling,” said Liana Hartwell, a sophomore. “Winning here with such a great community showing up is awesome. I’m happy we could do it for them and for us because we put in the work all season and it’s just awesome.”

Valley (21-1), which has only two seniors on its roster, was in control throughout after scoring the game’s first six points.

“Being able to play so fast is great, I mean we’ve done that all season,” Liana Hartwell said. “Pushing is our big thing. We had to slow down a little bit today because obviously (Wisdom is) a fast team as well and we had foul trouble. But I think being able to still do what we were doing and coming out so strong and not letting us get in our own heads was great.”

The one Wisdom player who posed a problem defensively for the Cavaliers was Ava Lerman, who finished with 20 points. But Valley held its opponent to 30 points or less for the 15th time in 22 games.

“I figured that (Wisdom would) hang for a while because they’re a champion, they’re a good team,” Gordon Hartwell said of the North regional champion, which ended its season with a 20-2 record. “But I also believed that, over time, our talent would separate them and that this would be one of those games where we just kept moving away and moving away. Because again, I thought we had matches on them. And it kind of worked out that way.”

Liana Hartwell finished with 10 points. Valley’s other double-figure scorer was sophomore Delia Hill, who tallied 13 points.