Crescenta Valley girls’ basketball upends Flintridge Sacred Heart
Following successful postseason runs last season, the Crescenta Valley High and Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy girls’ basketball teams look vastly different.
Crescenta Valley and Flintridge Sacred Heart met Tuesday in a pool-play contest of the Falcon Tip-Off Classic sporting rosters decorated with mostly news players.
Crescenta Valley proved to be the more cohesive, as five players scored 10 points apiece to post a 67-39 victory.
Crescenta Valley, which won the CIF Southern Section Division I-A championship last season, received 10 points each from Georgina Kregorian, Kaitlyn Jabourian, Rachel Dayag, Senayt Tassew and Sarah Perez in its season-opening contest.
“We have a lot of returners, but it’s a completely new approach we are taking,” said Crescenta Valley Coach Jason Perez, whose team is now in Division I-AA. “We are going to be pressing more on defense and we have to keep working on our defensive traps and rotations.
“On offense, we’ll be shooting a lot more three-pointers. It will be fun to see how we do.”
Crescenta Valley never trailed, jumping out to a 10-0 lead midway through the first quarter and leaving Flintridge Sacred Heart (0-2) frustrated.
A jump shot from Dayag gave the Falcons a 10-0 lead with 4:20 to go in the first quarter. Flintridge Sacred Heart, which advanced to the Division IV-AA quarterfinals last season and is now in Division III-AA, cut the deficit to 18-13 on a three-pointer by Claudia Ruder with 41.4 seconds to go in the opening quarter.
Crescenta Valley’s Caity Bouchard scored on a layup off an assist from Tassew to give the Falcons a 25-17 lead with 5:20 left in the second quarter. Dayag closed out the first-half scoring with a three-pointer from the left side to make it 40-25 with five seconds to go.
Crescenta Valley made nine of 24 three-point attempts in the contest.
“We have a lot of new players,” Tologs Coach Ty Buxman said. “We’ll be playing four straight days in this tournament, so there won’t really be any time to practice.
“We got off to a tough start and then we came back and played with them and then we had a couple of more lapses. So, it’s going to take some time. We’ll look to get a couple of wins in the tournament and get a better sense of each other.”
The Tologs got eight points and nine rebounds from Tori Conlon, seven points from Kysa Hayashi and five points and nine rebounds from Camilla Homans.
The Falcons collected 12 steals, compared to three from the Tologs.
