Carroll girls shine in City League showdown, beat Heights (+video)

Bishop Carroll girls coach Taylor Dugan had a specific set of instructions before Tuesday night’s basketball showdown with Heights at Carroll.

Mainly, to guard. Then guard some more. And when Heights guard and City League leading scorer Analyss Benally got the ball — “from five feet on out” — to really dig in.

After beating Heights 41-28, and holding Benally scoreless on 0-for-10 shooting and improving to 7-1 ... Dugan couldn’t think of anything else she needed.

“Absolutely not,” Dugan said. “I’m just proud of them. This game shows they’re competitors ... they show up to win and compete. We knew we had to play really tough, really hard and we did it.”

It wasn’t just Benally and her 17.9-point average that Carroll put the clamps on. Heights also had the City League’s No. 2 scorer, forward Athena Alvarado at 13.8 points, and the Eagles held her to eight points while its post, junior forward Ashley Carrillo, finished with a game-high 19 points.

Carroll senior guard Abby Sauber chipped in with 14 points on a night when the team’s leading scorer, Brynn Maul (11.5 points) was held scoreless.

The win puts Carroll in sole possession of second place.

“(Dugan) told us before the game that we just needed to keep our cool,” Carrillo said. “We went out there with a lot of confidence and the idea that we didn’t need to let them speed us up.”

It was Carroll who sped things up from the start, reeling off a 19-1 run in the first half on the way to a 28-13 lead at halftime. Heights (6-2) went without a field goal for a stretch of eight minutes in the first half.

Heights’ other loss this season also came on the road, to three-time defending Class 6A champion South.

“Our two tough road games this season that we’ve had to come in and get focused for, we came in and the shots just didn’t go,” Heights coach Kip Pulliam said. “We miss shots, put our head down and that affects our defense, because then we can’t press.”

Heights managed to cut Carroll’s lead back to single digits at 31-22 on a basket with Tania Lowe with 2:56 left in the third quarter, but Sauber opened the fourth quarter with a three-pointer to make the score 35-22 and the Falcons never threatened again.

“It can always go better, but I’m really proud of how we played defense tonight,” Sauber said. “(Benally) is a really great shooter, a great player. But when we shoot the way we can shoot, we’re hard to beat. Any one of us could blow up on any given night, and that makes it really hard to guard us.”

This story was originally published January 12, 2016 at 10:55 PM with the headline "Carroll girls shine in City League showdown, beat Heights (+video)."