Senior student Maddy Lethebe has been playing basketball at Bow Valley High School for nearly four years – but Tuesday night was the first time she and her teammates were able to raise their arms in victory over the Cochrane High Cobras after a thrilling post-season win.
“It was tight all the way through,” the 17-year-old point guard said yesterday. “We weren’t really expected to win. We knocked out our town rival – a team we’ve been wanting to beat for a long time.”
The 54-53 upset knocked the Cobras out of the Rocky View Sports Association’s quarterfinals, allowing Bow Valley to advance into the semi-final matchup tonight against the Chestermere Lakers.
Bobcats coach Craig MacTavish said with two players out due to injury on a team made up of only 10 girls, he knew they would need to give it their all against the Cobras in order to eke out a win.
“(Cobras coach) Randy (Peron) is a really good coach and he has really skilled players … We’d lost to them a couple of times already in the year. Odds were definitely stacked against us given the history – we really had to play our best game of basketball in order to have our best chance at beating them. We knew we had to play smart and play hard,” said MacTavish. “Everyone just pulled up their socks and … played some of the greatest defence we played all year.”
Lethebe herself pushed through and played 38 of the game’s 40 minutes, and she said everything came together for the Bobcats at just the right time.
“They were leading in the first half, and we kind of took over in the second,” she said. “I think it was a lot of our fast breaks – a lot of simple passes, pushing it down the court, making sure we used our speed over our skill.”
In the last two minutes of the game, the Bobcats were up by four points, and in the final seconds that lead tightened to just one point. Lethebe said it was do or die for the girls in that moment.
“It was really intense, since we were up by one and there was 10 seconds left,” she said. “We just made sure we held on to the ball.”
After the buzzer sounded, MacTavish and his energized crew gathered for some well-earned congratulations.
“(I told them), ‘You guys did what you wanted to do, so you should be proud of yourselves,” he said. “None of the girls had ever beaten Cochrane High. It’s pretty cool seeing it.”
