Janee’ Ford wishes her historic debut as the Greenville High School boys basketball team’s first female would’ve turned out better.
Instead, the Hornets fell 88-68 to a long, fast and athletic Greenwood Bulldogs team Thursday night.
“Last night, I couldn’t sleep and I felt nervous and jittery all day,” Ford said. “With this being the first game, I wanted to make sure that we were focused on taking care of business, but we have a lot of young guys, are still waiting on a few players from the football team and we just played the two time defending state 4A champions.”
Greenwood outscored Greenville 25-11 in the second quarter to take control of the game the rest of the way.
Bulldogs point guard Javion Smith led the visitors fast break and interior defense as he imposed his will on both ends of the court.
Hornets guard Le’Kenton McNeil and his backcourt mate Aaron Davenport made a couple of key buckets to quell the Bulldogs run. But Greenwood led 44-30 at the half.
Behind the early third quarter hustle of sophomore guard Antonian Johnson, the Hornets trimmed the Bulldogs lead down to 46-36 at the 6:05 mark. But the Greenwood transition game got the lead up to 58-38 at the 2:47 mark of the third quarter. The visitors led 67-46 after three quarters of play. Despite the Hornets efforts in fourth quarter, the Bulldogs maintained leads of 15 to 20 points throughout the final stanza.
Ford experienced the gamut of emotions all in her first quarter as Hornets head coach. Her team opened the game with high energy diving for lose balls and jumping out to a quick 10-0 lead.
However the Bulldogs responded with a 14-3 run of their own to take their first lead of the night at 14-14 with 1:26 remaining in the first frame. The score was tied at 19 heading into the second quarter.
“The biggest takeaway from this game is that we must improve our transition defense,” Ford explained. “Once we start getting back on defense you’ll begin to see traditional Greenville High basketball.”
