Campbell girls basketball overcomes slow start to beat Bow

LITCHFIELD – Not a lot of coaches would be happy about having a young team open the season against the defending division champions, but Bill Vermette wanted to see what his Bow High School girls basketball team could do Friday against Campbell.

What the Falcons did was enough for Vermette to feel pretty good about where his team is headed.

Bow got out to a 10-2 lead in the first quarter, but Campbell responded behind the shooting of senior Hannah Neild, who hit five 3-pointers to lead the Cougars to a 43-30 win in the Division III season opener for both teams.

Neild finished with a game-high 24 points, all of which came after the first quarter, as Campbell (1-0) outscored Bow 39-20 in the final 24 minutes. But through the first eight minutes, the Cougars struggled to get any shots to go down, including starting out 2 of 6 from the free throw line.

“With us, they’ll eventually fall,” Campbell coach Bobby Allan said. “Nerves play a big role, and everybody gets nervous out there. My job is to calm them down and we’ve certainly learned better than anybody else that it’s a long game.

“There’s 32 minutes of basketball to be played and we’re not going to win it in the first eight. We settled down and got into our offense and took care of business when we needed to.”

The game was tied at 15 when a 3-pointer by Neild gave Campbell the lead for good with less than 30 seconds to go in the half. Neild was fouled after a Bow turnover and made the first free throw and the Cougars got the ball back off the miss. Gabi Sott hit a jump shot with three seconds left in the half and Campbell went into the locker room up 21-15.

“Take away that last minute and a half, and it’s a one- or two-point game,” Vermette said. “It’s a barometer. It’s not a must-win situation and we relayed that to the kids. We wanted to win, but that wasn’t the top goal. It was finding more about ourselves and what we need to do to compete at the top level, which Campbell is.”

The Falcons hung around to start the second half, scoring the first four points of the third to cut the lead to 21-19. But neither team would score for the next three minute, until two free throws and a 3 by Neild put the Cougars up 26-19. That started Campbell on a 15-5 run that put the game away.

“Are we at the same point we were last year?” Allan said. “Probably. We probably looked just as bad, but it’s a long, long season, and we have a lot of work to do. We have to limit mistakes and take advantage when we can.”

Campbell also got seven points from Sott while Brittany Reidy and Trunca had four each. Bow was led by Lea Crompton, who had eight points, while Taylor Darrell and Amanda Murray had five apiece.