Girls Basketball: Hillcrest edges out Homewood-Flossmoor

Updated: November 17, 2011 9:13PM

Samirah Ali has had a lot of reasons to smile playing for Hillcrest the past couple of seasons.

Opening night, though, hasn’t exactly been a blast.

“The last two years we haven’t started with a win,” she said. “So I wanted to come back this time and get one.”

With a wild 70-62 girls basketball victory Thursday over host No. 24 Homewood-Flossmoor, it was mission accomplished.

Ali led the way for the No. 3 Hawks with 22 points. Dana Gettis added 19 points and Shannise Heady nine points and 11 rebounds.

For No. 4 H-F, Charnelle Reed had 19 points and eight rebounds, Danielle Woolfolk 10 points and Lauren Parker and Sydni Johnson nine points each.

It was a familiar cast of producers for Hillcrest, with one exception: Mariam Awoniyi. The 5-foot-10 junior guard/forward scored eight points and had eight rebounds. Her last two caroms came in the final two minutes, the first resulting in a putback, and the other resulting in two free throws at the other end by Heady.

They helped Hillcrest gain a little breathing room at 66-61, and prevented what would have been a pretty crushing opening-night collapse.

Hillcrest at one point led by as much as 37-18, only to see the Vikings rally big and even take the lead at 54-52 on a pull-up jumper by Johnson with 6:12 left in the final period.

“Just cleaning up the mess, basically,” Awoniyi said, smiling, as she described her rebound and putback after a miss by Jasmine Sanders to make it 64-61 Hillcrest. “I was pretty nervous at first, but I know I have to put the ball in the basket. So I did what I could to bring our team up.”

For H-F, it was a bittersweet ending to what was a relentless comeback that started late in the second quarter and peaked a few minutes into the fourth.

“We kind of came out flat and made some mistakes,” Vikings coach Dana Noble said. “We didn’t play strong with the basketball and it cost us, got us into a hole.

“We figured it out a little bit in the second quarter, talked it over at halftime, and came out and really understood what we were supposed to do. And then, toward the end, we had the momentum, but made the same mistakes with lack of concentration.”

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