Westhampton Beach's Clarke, Pierson's Lohmiller Shine in an Early Season Girls Basketball Battle of Underclassmen

When the Pierson/Bridgehampton girls basketball team hosted Westhampton Beach in a nonleague game on December 1, it featured some of the freshest faces that East End girls basketball has to offer.

Westhampton Beach freshman Sandra Clarke (team-high 12 points) and Pierson eighth-grader Coco Lohmiller (game-high 18 points) faced off for their respective teams, and while it was Clarke’s Hurricanes that eventually won the game, 45-26, over Lohmiller’s Whalers, it was a good battle for more than three quarters and both young players showed off their talents early and often.

Lohmiller opened the scoring with a three pointer to start the game less than a minute in. Not long after, Clarke stole the ball at midcourt and put Westhampton Beach on the board with an easy layup. Clarke and her teammate Jane Atkinson hit back-to-back threes to put the ’Canes up 12-5, but Lohmiller responded with a steal, layup and hitting her free throw on the and-one to make it a three-point game at 12-9.

But Kate Sweet hit another three — the third Hurricane to make a shot from beyond the arc in the first quarter — to give Westhampton Beach a 15-9 lead at the end of the first quarter, and it was clear the Canes’ depth was going to be tough for the Whalers going forward.

A pair of late threes by Lohmiller closed Pierson’s first-half deficit to just two points at 19-17 with 45 seconds remaining in the second quarter, but Clarke responded with a three of her own before the half’s final buzzer to make it a 22-17 game in favor of the ’Canes.

Lohmiller finished the first half having scored 14 of the 17 Whalers’ points. Clarke scored 10 points in the first half, but had a little more help from her teammates offensively. The Westhampton Beach defense honed in on Lohmiller and held her to just four points in the second half, and the team’s overall depth shined with a number of different scorers getting in the mix. Jasmine Taylor, another strong freshman, scored seven points, as did Kylah Avery.

Westhampton Beach outscored Pierson, 23-9, in the second half to create what was a somewhat misleading lopsided final score with the game being competitive much of the time.

“I thought it was a really clean game from both teams, not a lot of turnovers,” Westhampton Beach head coach Katie Peters said after the game. “I thought it was a really fundamentally sound game, and with both teams being so young, it’ll be fun to watch both teams grow and compete against one another in the years to come.

“I think Sandra is an extremely well-rounded player,” Peters said of her freshman, who transferred in from Ithaca in the offseason. “She does not play like a freshman, she has great court sense. Coco is another phenomenal player. Sandra, overall, her game is really a complete game. She plays the floor, plays unselfish, looks to score when she needs to. I’m looking forward to watching her grow over the next four years.”

Outside of Lohmiller, Pierson only had two other scorers, with Cali Wilson finishing with seven and senior Riley Roesel chipping in with a point. It was a far cry from the team’s overall scoring in what was a tight loss to Eastport-South Manor just a few nights prior, when Lohmiller led the team in scoring but had gotten 10 points from Lyra Aubrey and a few other contributions. Pierson head coach John “Woody” Kneeland explained that one of the many things Westhampton Beach did well in the game was deny the ball going into the paint to Aubrey, which kept her off the scoresheet.

“I think today we were a little young,” he said. “I don’t think we got the ball in the middle in Lyra’s hands as much as we needed to because Lyra can score. So we were an outside shooting team, for the most part, which probably isn’t our strength. We want to drive, we want to put the ball in the middle, that’s how we stay in games, and-one’s, fouls, attacking the basket.

“For 80 percent of the game, we sold out on defense, and then they just went to a different energy level on defense and offensive rebounds because they started to get three to four different opportunities every time in the second half,” Kneeland added. “Nobody can beat that.”

Peters said she appreciated the depth her team showed, both offensively and defensively.

“We talk about that often, the fact that everyone has to chip in, offensively especially,” she said. “Defensively, I think we’re a very even-keeled team in terms of personnel — we’re deep defensively. We all know what to do and how to do it. However, offensively, each person has to look to be a threat and look to put the ball in the basket, so teams who play us know that anyone who gets the ball can put it in.”

Westhampton Beach was coming off a 50-30 victory over Mattituck on November 29, and also played reigning Class C county champion Port Jefferson the day after beating Pierson, suffering its first loss, 40-34.

Pierson, meanwhile, lost to another Class A school, Sayville, on Saturday in what was a lopsided score, but Kneeland had said after his team’s loss to Westhampton Beach that he had scheduled almost all of his nonleague games against larger, talented schools to get the team ready for the league season.

“I keep telling them, all I ask for is effort from buzzer to buzzer, and I think they’re doing that for me,” he said. “We’re trying not to worry about who we’re playing. I told them I only scheduled games against large A schools so that hopefully league games are a little bit easier. This was yet another ‘A’ coach that came up to us at the end of the game and said, ‘I’m impressed by your girls, they didn’t lay down and die or fall over for a bigger school.’”