Piute romps its way to 1A girls hoops title

In what was one of the most dominating championship-game performances I’ve ever seen, Piute romped to the 1A girls basketball championship tonight at the Sevier Valley Center.
In fact, as I’m thinking it through, I can’t think of a team performance in a state championship game that I’ve personally witnessed that was as dominating as the one that Piute produced tonight.
Piecing everything together at exactly the right moment, Piute quite simply obliterated a pretty good Duchesne team by a two-to-one score of 68-34.
Quite a few people who came to the 1A tournament this week thought that if the T-Birds played their “best basketball,” they would eventually walk away as state champions.
But I don’t know if anyone – including the T-Birds themselves – believed they could be as dominating as they were.
Everyone inside the Sevier Valley Center has long since left (bar myself and the custodial stuff), but before I pack up and head north, here are a few additional nuggets for you. I wrote two stories on tonight’s championship game – one that will run in print and another that will be online-only – but there were still several interesting thoughts from the T-Birds that didn’t make it into either story. Here are a few of them:

Piute coach Wade Westwood on whether he envisioned that the “best-case scenario” was as good as what the final product actually was:
“Oh, I thought it would be a lot closer game. The way Duchesne was shootin’ yesterday and the whole tournament, I figured we’d have our hands full. And we did for a while, but we got up and I don’t know…”

Westwood on the killer mentality that Piute had:
“We call it the kill switch, and Kandice Gleave always says at halftime, ‘OK girls, it’s time to flip the switch and turn the kill switch to on.’ And I think that’s what we’ve done.”

Piute guard Kandice Gleave on finally breaking through after coming up just short in previous years:
“A lot of times we just got stopped, and it was a heart-breaker for us. But this year, we weren’t going to let anyone come between us. We were gonna play as a team and we were gonna win. We knew we could do it, and it was just a matter of getting it done.”

Piute guard Loni Allan on getting out and running against Duchesne:
“I think we were just running off adrenalin. We just like to run, and we knew that we could just run them into the ground.”