Girls Basketball: Zion-Benton’s rally sinks Libertyville

Zion-Benton coach Tonya Johnson has been under the weather and missed her team’s loss to Stevenson earlier in the week.

“I feel better now,” she said Saturday.

Sophomore Samantha Rodriguez’ hit a running 15-foot from the right baseline to cap a furious rally from a nine-point, fourth-quarter deficit and lead No. 13 Zion-Benton to a 38-36 victory over host Libertyville.

The Zee-Bees outscored the host Wildcats 12-1 over the final 7:42.

“The coaches just told us to keep our composure and keep our poise, go out there and play hard and keep playing defense,” said Rodriguez, whose game-winning shot came with 3.1 seconds left. “You can never give up on defense and that’s what we did.”

The win allowed Zion-Benton (5-2) to even its record in the North Suburban Lake at 1-1.

“This would have been a very hard loss,” Rodriguez said. “This definitely puts us back on track for the rest of the year. Thursday (a 40-39 setback against to Stevenson) was a hard loss, especially at home. We still have to work on a lot of things.”

Octavia Crump led Zion-Benton with 11 points and seven rebounds. Her putback of her own miss gave the Zee-Bees a 36-35 lead with 2:55 remaining. It was Zion-Benton’s first lead since 4-2 at the 7:11 mark of the first quarter.

“(Crump) did an awesome job on the boards,” Johnson said. “She had a lot of energy. These are battles, Libertyville and Zion. We both lost really important seniors from a year ago. The girls are still finding themselves. We have to find ourselves defensively. That’s who we are.

“At halftime, we talked about the only way we’re going to win this game if we battled and had some defensive intensity, and if they didn’t do that they weren’t going to be playing,” the coach added. “Can we play much better defense than that? Yes.”

Kerry Risley and Alex Haley each had 12 points for Libertyville (6-2, 0-1), which built a 17-8 lead late in the first quarter and enjoyed a 35-26 advantage heading into the final eight minutes on a basket by Risley with :02 left in the third quarter.

But turnovers, missed shots and 1-of-4 free-throw shooting in fourth quarter doomed the Wildcats.

“We made some silly passes and rebounding hurt us,” Libertyville coach Kathie Swanson said. “Those two things. We missed some free throws at the end. We put ourselves in a position to win and we just didn’t execute.

“But this is a learning experience,” she added. “We’re a young team. We can play with them. We showed we can play with anybody in this conference. Yeah, it’s disappointing, but this is a long conference season and we’ll be ready to play next time.”

© 2012 Sun-Times Media, LLC. All rights reserved. This material may not be copied or distributed without permission. For more information about reprints and permissions, visit www.suntimesreprints.com. To order a reprint of this article, click here.