Coupeville Sports

Mollie Bailey slapped home a pair of buckets Tuesday as the Coupeville JV girls tangled with powerful King’s. (Photo by JohnsPhotos.net)

It was a brawl, then it was a blowout.

The Coupeville High School JV girls basketball squad stood tall for nine minutes Tuesday, pushing visiting King’s to the brink.

Then, the Knights remembered they have a roster stocked full of AAU vets with dreams of playing college ball, and they reverted to form, exploding on separate runs of 15-0, 20-0, and 12-0.

What was a 10-9 CHS lead after Morgan Stevens rained down a fall-away jumper to open the second quarter turned into a 58-23 King’s win, and you can’t say it wasn’t expected.

The Knights second squad is a shiny 11-4 this season, having lost only to 3A and 4A schools and one of the state’s premier 1A schools, Cashmere.

But, while the Wolves fell to 4-3 in North Sound Conference play, 8-7 overall, heading into their season finale Friday at Granite Falls, they made some inroads.

The 23 points is the most the King’s JV has surrendered to a conference foe this season, and is a solid nine-point improvement from the first time the schools met, a 49-14 Knights win.

Coupeville came out aggressively Tuesday, using inspired rebounding from Ja’Kenya Hoskins to force King’s to up its game.

Early buckets from Mollie Bailey, off a sweet feed from Anya Leavell, and Hoskins, off of an offensive rebound, staked the Wolves to a 4-2 lead, the first of four positive scores for CHS.

Izzy Wells drained a put-back after snagging a rebound to make it 6-5, Abby Mulholland twirled in a jumper off a pass from Audrianna Shaw to put Coupeville up 8-7, then Stevens netted her bucket off a Leavell set-up pass.

The action was crisp, the Wolves were scrambling for loose balls and caroms, and anything seemed possible.

And then death came from above.

King’s dropped in a trio of three-balls, part of the seven it would hit in the game, and, in the blink of an eye, a 15-0 run had changed everything.

Mulholland did her best to get the Wolves back into the flow, netting back-to-back jumpers, with the second bucket coming of yet another superb pass from Leavell, but King’s wasn’t having it.

Scoring the final eight points of the half, then 24 of the first 26 after the break, the visitors put the game far out of reach.

From the final three minutes of the second quarter until the last half of the fourth, Coupeville could only hit one single, solitary shot, though it was a beautiful, crowd-pleasing jumper from hard-working freshman Alana Mihill.

While the rim was unforgiving, the Wolves never stopped working, and they garnered some respect from their foes at the end, closing the game on a 7-2 surge.

Wells went off for five of her team-high seven points during that part of the game, while Bailey added an artful layup.

Mulholland tossed in six points to back Wells, with Bailey (4), Mihill (2), Stevens (2), and Hoskins (2) also scoring.