On February 8th our girls basketball team started their D1 CIF playoffs against La Salle. Our girls were down early and were able to come back and win from a last second shot from Junior Kamora Fletcher. Junior Jaelyn Ramos led the team in points with 13 and rebounds with 6. Senior Janessa Rodiguez led the team with 3 assists.
The Saints started off slow as they were down 6-12 in the first quarter. The 2nd quarter wasn’t better as the saints were down 31-11 at half and things were looking dim. Junior Jaelyn Ramos knew what it would take to win this game.
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“It’s going to take a lot of hard work pushing each other on the court, talking to each other and keeping each other motivated.”
— Jaelyn Ramos
Jaelyn Ramos definitely did put in the hard work as she led the team in points and rebounds. The saints cut the lead to 11 at the end of the 3rd quarter making the score 25-36. The fourth quarter is when it all started coming together the crowd was into it the girls were playing with so much swagger at this point La Salle was deflated. Jaelyn drives to the bucket, gets an and-one to tie the game with 30.7 seconds left. She shoots her free throw and takes the lead 42-41. La Salle answers back with a bucket with 17 seconds left, Saints use a timeout with 6.6 seconds. Jaelyn inbounds the ball to Janessa and gives it back to Jaelyn they knock the ball out of her hand into Olivia Romeros hand who puts up a desperation shot that is no good. Kamora Fletcher is there for the put back make with no time left to win the game 44-43.
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“I still hadn’t processed it,”
— Kamora Fletcher
it definitely meant a lot. I do know in my thought process when I was putting the ball up, I was like shoot I don’t know if i’m going to get the ball up in time before the buzzer. It felt unreal,” Junior Kamora Fletcher said when talking about her thought process on that final play. “We all felt like we still had it. We were talking after the game and we all had a feeling that we were still going to get back and we weren’t feeling defeated.” Kamora said how the team felt on the 20 point halftime deficit. This team has a lot of experience in the playoffs so they were ot fazed when they had one play left to win. They had been there before and knew they were able to get it done. The Saints went on the road next round to play Oxnard.
