High school basketball: Lehi girls hang on for nail-biter victory

LEHI — Region 7 girls basketball is turning into a rocking roller-coaster this season, as most every team is battling hard midway through the campaign for playoff position.

Timpanogos is riding easily in first place and brand new school Westlake is currently in seventh place. But the league's other five teams are all within two games of each other at the midseason mark.

The Lehi and Orem girls took to the court on Friday night in one of those unpredictable, wild and woolly Region 7 games, and it was hopeless to try to predict a winner with even seconds remaining in the game, as the Pioneers came away with the 49-48 nail-biter and improved their region record to 4-2 while dropping the Tigers' region record to 2-4.

"This game was way too close. Orem came to play and we didn't. I take my hat off to Orem, period," said Lehi coach Troy Gifford, whose team is ranked in the state's Top 20.

"Orem threw a lot of different things at us. It was more upbeat-running than we've been doing," he added.

The game started off with an up-and-down battle in the first period with two ties and four lead changes. But though the Pioneers held a five-point lead at 11-6, the Tigers evened things up with a 5-0 run and were only down 13-11 going into the second.

The second quarter found the Pioneers coming out strong and sneaking out to a 25-16 lead, but as the time dwindled away and the two teams made more and more trips to the free-throw line, despite the Tigers shooting only 8-of-19 on their first-half free throws, they were able to gain on the Pioneers and chop the lead to 27-26. A big part of the reason behind that was Lehi's miserable 3-of-12 mark from the line in the first half.

The Tigers took a quick lead in the third quarter, then gave it right back for the rest of the period, finding themselves behind 35-31 to the Pioneers after a solid run in the third.

The first half of the fourth quarter also basically belonged to Lehi, as the Pioneers retained a slim margin until just over midway through the fourth when the Tigers went on a flurry of their own, turning a 39-33 deficit into a 44-39 lead with an 11-0 run in which five different Orem players scored.

They were able to grab steal after steal from the undermanned Pioneers, who found themselves in desperate foul trouble, and their shots started dropping.

But just as quickly as they grabbed the five-point lead, Lehi's Jackie Cattani dropped her third trey of the game to slice the margin to only a pair, and the race was on.