With neither team able to hit from the perimeter, Belton used a solid defensive effort in the paint to topple Temple’s Tem-Cats 43-31 in a District 13-5A girls basketball tilt Friday night at Tiger Gym.
The victory pushed Belton (18-10) to 7-2 in district and kept the Lady Tigers in a tie for the league lead with Bryan (24-8, 7-2), a 66-49 winner over Copperas Cove (23-9, 6-3), heading into Tuesday’s 13-5A finale at Cove.
“Our girls’ goal is to win the district title and they’re not backing down from it,” said Belton coach Randy Bell, whose squad had already clinched a playoff berth. “And just the fact that we’ve made the playoffs is a testament to these girls.”
For Temple (13-17, 2-7), the game was a replay of most of its district season. The Tem-Cats, hampered by poor shooting most of the year, went 9-of-47 from the floor to shoot 19 percent.
“If you hold someone to 43 points on their floor you ought to win the game. But we shot horrible from the floor and from the line,” said Temple coach Don Layton, whose team made only 46 percent of its free-throw attempts. “Our kids played hard again, but we’ve been hampered by our shooting all year.”
But despite their scoring woes, the Tem-Cats were in it until the final minutes due to the Lady Tigers’ own shooting problems.
Belton, which relies on its sharp-shooting guards, went 12-of-42 (29 percent) from the field and struggled to put Temple away.
“Both teams shot bad. That’s for sure,” Bell said. “A lot of our problems had to do with their defense. They outplayed us defensively and kept us out of synch.”
After going 1-for-13 in the first quarter, Temple managed to tie the game at 8 on a Dorothy Knox 3-pointer at the 5:33 mark of the second period before the Lady Tigers mounted a run.
Blair Heitmiller drained a pair of 3s and added a pull-up jumper in the lane that beat the buzzer to give Belton a 19-10 halftime advantage.
Unable to score from the outside, Temple turned to post Porscha Weddington in the third quarter.
