Sachem East Girls Stay Undefeated in League I with Win Over Longwood

Despite a large Longwood run to start the third quarter, Sachem East was able to hang on and pull away Friday night with a 56-39 win on the road.

The Arrows led 33-17 at the half and the Lions run cut the deficit to six. East head coach Matt Brisson was quick to call a time out to calm his team down.

“It was trying to get our composure back, see whether or not anyone was injured, who’s confused, anybody doesn’t know what sets they have or who’s guarding who,” Brisson said. “It winds up being a communication thing and we are getting better at it but we still need to work. We’ve had success winning games but we still need to tweak a lot of things we’re doing.”

There wasn’t much to tweak Friday night. Junior guard Meagan Doherty was all over the court for the Arrows, scoring 18 points, knocking down three shots from beyond the arc and dishing out four assists. She teamed with freshman Kathleen Everson to form an inside-outside combo that was too much for Longwood (3-6 overall, 1-4 League I) to handle. Everson contributed 17 points.

“It’s good to get our confidence up and it helped Katie [Doherty] out because she played well at the point today,”  Meagan Doherty said. “We really needed a game like this to get our confidence back because we didn’t play that well the last couple of games.” The younger Katie Doherty finished the game with six points and four assists.

The score was 35-29 after Asja Mayo capped the Longwood run that got them back in the game. But Lions would not score another field goal the rest of the quarter, and by the time they made another shot from the floor they were trailing, 46-32.

“They played really well,” Longwood head coach Mark Gordon said of the Arrows, now 4-0 in League I. “They capitalized off our mistakes and they played really well together. We’re trying to get where they are.”

Gordon said he told his team to play loose and just give the best effort they could. “We have nothing to lose, no one is expecting us to win,” he said.

Meagan Doherty was not expecting Longwood to win either.

“I think it’s 56 in a row now,” she said of her teams league winning streak. “There’s a lot of pressure, it feels great. I promised Kristen [Doherty] and Hops [Caitlin Hopkins] that I was going to keep this going, so I expect to be undefeated the entire season. There’s a lot of pressure but I think we have it in us.”