Feb 18, 2016 4 min read

McMURRAY – It was not difficult to see why South Fayette’s girls basketball team is top-seeded in Class AAA.

The Lions have good size, great speed, cat-like quickness and amazing ball movement. In transition, they can make a good team look bad, which is what they did Thursday night at Peters Township High School.

South Fayette raced up and down the court, scoring 14 layups and 20 points in the third quarter to blow out Ringgold, 58-32, in the first round of the WPIAL Class AAA playoffs.

South Fayette (19-3) will take on Chartiers Valley, a 61-18 winner over Brownsville, in the quarterfinals. Ringgold finished the season with a 13-11 record.

Samantha Kosmacki, a 5-11 sophomore guard, scored a season-high 24 points on 12 baskets – nine on layups – and Emily Anderson, a 6-4 senior center, grabbed 16 rebounds despite picking up her second foul with 1:10 left in the first quarter. Her foul trouble made South Fayette’s transition game all the more important.

“Those are things we always try to do. We always want to win the transition battle,” said South Fayette head coach Matt Bacco. “There’s two sides to that. We want to push the ball responsibly but we also want to make sure we get back on defense. We also want to eliminate the transition opportunities of our opponent. I thought, by and large, we did that as the game went on. Sam was able to get out into open space.”

The Lions’ defense was unrelenting, producing 25 Ringgold turnovers, many of which led to easy baskets. The Rams had seven in each of the first three quarters and that was a main reason why they trailed 15-5 after one quarter, 30-15 after two and 50-25 after three.

“All season, we’ve been struggling with turnovers, bad passes and just making smart decisions,” said Ringgold head coach Erika McCarthy. “That’s been one of our weaknesses and something we have to work on next year.”

South Fayette hurt Ringgold with double-teams off the man-to-man defense. Ringgold’s guards could not control the basketball most of the time.

“We have different looks we throw at different teams,” Bacco said. “We like to pick and choose when to trap the ball-handler. We want to make them handle the ball without time or space. When we did that, we forced them to do things they weren’t comfortable doing. And we got transition baskets.”

Two major runs by South Fayette – 10-0 between the second and third quarters and 12-0 midway through the third quarter – put the game away. The quick outlet passes caught Ringgold’s guards flat-footed.

“We always want to push the ball because they were not getting back as well,” said Kosmacki. “We also knew we had to get back on defense because they pushed the ball at us. I try to run wide and then get a hard cut to the basket. They had a hard time stopping that.”

Ringgold, the third-place team in Section 4, got a strong game from Ashley Briscoe. The 6-1 sophomore forward scored seven points, grabbed 16 rebounds and blocked two shots, one from Anderson. Bailey Cooper, a 5-10 senior guard, led the Rams with 14 points, six coming on three-point field goals.

“We knew they outsized us so we worked on some 2-3 zones that we could double on the post,” said McCarthy. “(Anderson) wasn’t finishing and got in foul trouble early. We just couldn’t take the momentum from the first half into the second. I knew they were a fast-break team. We weren’t playing good defense, we weren’t moving our feet, and that hurt us in the second half.”