MADISON — Nothing went right for the Monmouth Academy girls basketball team Friday night. Unfortunately for the Mustangs, the same could not be said for Madison.
The Bulldogs played smothering defense, dominated the glass and shot the lights out at Veneziano Gym in the Mountain Valley Conference showdown, all of which added up to a 51-30 runaway win for Madison. Senior guard Emily Edgerly led the way with a game-high 21 points, while classmate Katie Worthen added 14 more.
The Bulldogs improved to 7-3 on the season. Monmouth dropped to 8-2, only four days removed from a win over Class C South leader and defending state champion Boothbay.
“I liked our defensive effort,” Madison head coach Al Veneziano said. “We really responded, big time. We played very good defense. We have some size, and we’re getting the box-outs now and doing some very good things.”
Monmouth scored the contest’s first three points and closed the first quarter with the final three. In between, Madison went on a 15-0 run — one similar to the 14-0 stretch the Bulldogs enjoyed to open the second half — and pulled away early.
Against Madison’s full-court zone pressure, the Mustangs were simply overwhelmed.
Though Madison shot 22 of 52 from the floor (42.3 percent), it was on the boards where the Bulldogs made hay. Four different Madison players pulled down at least five rebounds, led by nine from Brooke McKenney (nine points) and eight from Abi Spaulding.
Madison finished with a 32-19 rebounding advantage, including 17-5 in the second half.
“That’s the best we’ve come out in any game this season,” Worthen said. “We started off really intense, and we were helping a lot on gap (defense), which is what we’ve been working on a lot in practice. And our rebounding was crucial.”
Two buckets from Edgerly early in the third quarter stretched the Madison lead to 29-15, and Worthen took a nice feed from Edgerly for an inside score followed by one of her three 3-pointers on the very next possession as the advantage ballooned to 19 points.
By the time Audrey Fletcher (11 points) finally stopped the bleeding for Monmouth with a trey with 1:42 left in the period — the Mustangs’ first points of the half — things had long been decided.
“It was definitely execution, and we’ll go from there,” Monmouth coach Katie McAllister said. “We were flustered. We practice everything we should have done, but we forgot what we were supposed to do. I don’t know why.”
Monmouth was without Libby Clement, who missed the game due to illness. McAllister said it was not an excuse.
“I think she would have made a difference on the boards. But she doesn’t regulate our effort and our execution,” McAllister said. “She definitely would have helped out on the boards, and that’s where we lost it was on the offensive boards. They got a lot of second-chance points.”
Katie Harris had six points and 10 rebounds in the loss.
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