Girls Basketball: Janee Thompson leads Young past Proviso East

Updated: February 21, 2012 8:29PM

What a difference a few days makes.

Young coach Corry Irvin, who watched her team stumble through the first half of its regional championship game last week against the hosts at Proviso West, put her team through a couple of rigorous practices over the weekend.

The difference was apparent just minutes into Tuesday’s Class 4A sectional semifinal against Proviso East at Lyons.

Janee Thompson had 21 points and five assists, Linnae Harper had 16 points, and Alexis Lloyd added 13 points and five steals as No. 1 Young (30-0) built a 44-17 halftime lead and coasted to a 69-34 victory over the Pirates.

“After getting off to a slow start in our last game, we didn’t feel like we played the way we should have,” Thompson said. “So as a team and as a coaching staff we decided that we really needed to refocus. I think our hard work in practice carried over into the game today.”

Irvin was clearly more pleased with her team’s performance Tuesday, when the Dolphins came up with 21 steals and held their own on the boards despite yielding a few inches to Proviso East’s tandem of 6-foot-3 Jakeisha and 6-1 Jaliria Wells.

“I thought we had some hard practices, so we really worked out some things after what happened,” she said. “I thought we just had a couple letdowns in the fourth quarter. We didn’t have as much as intensity as the majority of the game.

“But most of the time I thought we played real intense on defense and got the looks we wanted on offense, even though we didn’t finish them all the time,” Irvin added.

Harper said that Young may have been a little too excited at the start when both teams went nearly three minutes without scoring. But as soon as Young turned up the pressure on defense, Proviso East had few answers.

“Our defense is what creates our offense,” Harper said. “We try to play with intensity and toughness and force other teams to commit plenty of turnovers. I think we were just excited early because of this game and trying to do everything right. We became calmer and did what we had to do to win.”

Demetria Watson led Proviso East (25-9) with 12 points and Kalea Parks added seven. The Wells sisters each had four points,

“One of the things we talked is that we thought they would run some with us,” Thompson said. “We through that would be in our favor. We wanted the big girls to have to make the decisions against our pressure. We were looking to guard everyone else and let the big girls come and make the decisions.”

Thompson and Harper each had four steals for Young, which led by as many as 40 points early in the fourth quarter before turning the game over to its bench.

“When we kind of have a size disadvantage, our pressure kind of balances it out,’ Thompson said. “Once we let the big girls catch the ball, we denied their guards into turned their passes into quick turnovers, which turned into quick baskets for us.”

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