By David Shaw

Salisbury Post

GRANITE QUARRY — Here’s the most-telling statistic from Tuesday’s East Rowan girls basketball game: visiting West Forsyth went eight minutes without making a basket and still won 56-36.

“None of us had any intensity or fire,” East guard Ashley Collins said. “It’s like we came out dead.”

That seems a little drastic, but vultures were circling overhead by late in the first quarter. East (9-12, 5-4 CPC) converted only 13 field goals, fell behind 23-10 midway through the second quarter and never recovered. Coach Karen Garmon offered a reasonable explanation.

“This was Senior Night,” she said after East had its four-game winning streak halted. “And I felt like we were totally distracted. I mean, the girls did an excellent job of decorating and getting everything together, but it was a night filled with distractions. We never got things going our way. We couldn’t get our minds on what we were trying to do.”

East was trying to contend for second place in the CPC standings but instead fell into a third-place tie with Davie County. Outside of an opening-minute layup by Rebecca Cooper — the Mustangs’ only senior — there was little worth celebrating.

“You’ve gotta have a little bit of heart to win,” said Cooper, who netted four points in her final regular-season home game. “But we didn’t show anything. We didn’t play to our potential at all.”

West Forsyth did. The Titans (11-10, 5-5) got 17 points from penetrating guard Morgan Smith and nine from 6-foot-5 junior Elizabeth Maas, who was plagued with foul trouble.

“East does such a good job hitting the boards,” praised winning coach Keith Pinnix. “We had to battle to keep them off.”

It was a battle easily won. East offered little resistance, prompting Garmon to sequester her team in the locker room for 20 minutes after the game.

“The past four games we were shooting the lights out,” she said. “Tonight we struggled offensively. After a while it became a mind game. Usually our offense fires up our defense. But we were flat offensively, then we’d go back and we were flat defensively.”

That was apparent when West Forsyth failed to connect from the field between the middle of the second and third quarters. It’s penalty? A 13-point margin was reduced to 11.

“When the other team is cold,” Pinnix said, “you can survive a stretch like that.”

west forsyth (56) — Smith 17, Maas 9, A.Miller 8, Bolar 7, Foster 4, Henderson 4, Urban 3, Lunsford 2, Griffen 2.

east rowan (36) — Collins 12, Poole 6, Cooper 4, K.Stout 4, Barrier 4, H.Miller 2, Hill 2, Cress 2.

W. Forsyth 11 12 14 19 — 56

E. Rowan 6 8 11 11 — 36

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Contact David Shaw at dshaw@salisburypost.com.