Pawtucket girls basketball holds off defending D-II champion West Warwick. Here's how

PAWTUCKET — When the Pawtucket girls basketball team needed their guard to come through most, Taniyah Teemer was there.

The junior blocked the would-be game tying basket against West Warwick, the Division II defending champions, and escaped with a 46-44 win on Thursday night. The triumph keeps the Shea/Tolman co-op atop the Division II-C standings at 11-1.

“Stick to your man,” Aryana Blanco said of the plan on the final play of the contest. “Stick to your man and don't let anybody cut, no backdoors, and shoutout to [Teemer] — she did that.”

Here's more on how Pawtucket's defense shifted on Thursday:

Flipped the script

Pawtucket isn’t known for fast starts and after falling behind, 4-0, it appeared it was heading in that direction again.

But the championship contenders dialed up the defensive pressure with a full-court press that resulted in a quick 10-0 run. With 4:15 left in the frame Tiyara Gonzalez, who finished with a game-high 19 points, canned a long 3-pointer to cap the run. The advantage swelled to 24-12 on Blanco’s turnaround jumper in the lane with 2:15 left.

“We tend to start slow and have a great second half,” Pawtucket coach Walter Gonzalez said. “We flipped the script. And we just have to be a little more consistent with that and we’ve been preaching all year.”

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Blanco and Trinity Burk added eight apiece for Pawtucket.

“We can all run on offense, so we have to make sure once we get the [turnover] we have to look for the outlet,” Tiyara Gonzalez said. “We need to make sure our team has an opportunity to score.”

Champs swing back

Trailing by seven near the start of the fourth quarter, senior Elizabeth Gresian (team-high 11 points) swished a triple to get West Warwick to within 39-35 with 7:46 to play.

Pawtucket went on a 4-0 spurt following the basket, but the Wizards, aided by a full-length outlet by Gresian secured an easy layup. And then Alexa Foley’s personal 5-0 run pulled West Warwick to within a point at 43-42 with two minutes left.

“Basketball is a game of runs,” Blanco said. “They had their run, and then we're the better team, so we had our run at the end.”

Said Tiyara Gonzalez: “We knew that this was a very big game for us. They’re the defending champions, we just knew that we had to come in mentally ready and just be locked in.”

After a West Warwick free throw was waved off due to a lane violation, Gonzalez sandwiched three makes at the line between the Wizard’s Calla Davide’s layup. The Wizards, trailing 46-44, forced a shot clock violation with 7.4 seconds left. Out of a WW timeout, Teemer denied the final attempt to force overtime.

“This is the team that we wanted to beat since we lost to them last season,” Blanco said. “And we came out ready to fight.”

Davide chipped in 10 points.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Pawtucket girls basketball holds off defending champion West Warwick