Late surge not enough as Lubbock-Cooper girls fall to Frisco Liberty in state final
SAN ANTONIO — Everything was going according to plan.
For the first eight minutes of the Class 5A state championship game, the Lubbock-Cooper girls basketball team's formula worked to perfection. Shots were falling. The defense was solid. The lead was 11. It was all coming up in favor of the Lady Pirates.
But Frisco Liberty, the more sizeable bunch on the Alamodome floor, knew what it had to do. The Redhawks chipped away at the deficit, then went up by nine early in the fourth quarter. Momentum had shifted, though only for a moment.
Calyn Dallas connected on her first, and only, 3-pointer of the tournament. Peyton North found a seam to the bucket. Majik Esquivel rediscovered her stroke. Suddenly, the Lady Pirates were closing in on history.
Much like their meeting back in the 2021 semifinals, though, Liberty found a way. After Cooper made it a one-point game with 1:17 left in regulation, Liberty's standout freshman Jacy Abii connected on a pair of easy buckets at the rim. Cooper's final attempts were off the mark, giving the Redhawks a 57-52 triumph.
The Lady Pirates (31-7) will have to wait a bit longer to call themselves state champions.
"Just stagnant on offense and fouls," Cooper coach Kyle Lovorn said of the middle portion of the game. "They got to the free-throw line too much, and that just kind of changed the tone of the game a little bit and they ended up getting in that halfcourt trap, the zone, in the second quarter and this kind of threw us off a little bit and, really, our spacing and how we're moving."
Cooper got hot early thanks to eight quick points for Esquivel to put her team up 13-2. Esquviel — who had a team-high 16 points — cooled off after her third 3-pointer of the game. After that made bucket, Liberty closed the first half on a 12-1 run.
Size was clearly in the advantage of Liberty, who has three starters at 5-foot-11 or taller, while Cooper had one in the 6-foot Calyn Dallas.
Dallas, though, said the height differential wasn't as big as the defense's slow reaction time to Liberty's attack in transition.
"We weren't really rotating quite well enough in our press," Dallas said. "Once we started fixing that, it was a little too late with foul trouble and everything."
With Dallas being shaded by the 6-foot-1 Abii much of the game, Carisa Cortez (15 points, five assists) took control of the offense, getting to the free-throw line 12 times and putting pressure on the Liberty defense.
Liberty pushed its advantage to 43-34 in the fourth before Dallas finally connected on a triple. That set off a back-and-forth sequence with Liberty pounding the paint and Cooper clawing back with outside shots.
Esquviel had look at a corner 3 to tie the game with 36 seconds left, but it was altered by the Liberty defense and led to a layup on the other end by Abii (15 points, four steals).
"That was one of thing that we put a lot of emphasis on," Abii said of Liberty's size advantage. "I think we did a really good job executing it later in the game, but I think that once we started using that as our advantage that's really where we started to separate ourselves from the other team."
Keyera Roseby was named the MVP of the championship game, posting a game-high 21 points on 6-of-14 shooting to go with eight rebounds. Liberty outrebounded Cooper 37-18 for the game with North (seven points) leading the Lady Pirates with six boards.
"We talked about it before the game that no matter what happens we're proud of each other for what we've accomplished," North said, "because we accomplished something not many teams get to do: have a team get to this point.
"We started with 200-something teams and we were the final two. We talked about it. We were like, no matter what happens, we're so proud of each other and we know we worked our butts off and we won the toughness battle out there."
Class 5A state championship
Frisco Liberty 57, Lubbock-Cooper 52
Frisco Liberty 8 15 14 20 — 57
Lubbock-Cooper 17 4 9 22 — 52
Frisco Liberty (29-10) — Z'Naiha Hensley 4, Zelle Jolie Moreno 2, Keyera Roseby 21, Journee Harris 7, Jacy Abii15, Lilian Johnson 6, Judith Aluga 2.
Lubbock-Cooper (31-7) — Gabby Contreras 4, Calyn Dallas 7, Peyton North 7, Carisa Cortez 15, Majik Esquivel 16, Rylee Robertson 3.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Late surge not enough as Lubbock-Cooper girls fall to Frisco Liberty in state final
