Lakeside Girls Lose 1-Point Game to Dunwoody

On a night when the Dunwoody girls basketball team was honoring six outgoing seniors, the Lady Wildcats narrowly escaped an upset bid from a senior-less squad to hold on for a 36-35 victory. Lakeside’s Alysia Burks had a chance to win the game on a jumper at the buzzer, but the shot fell short to give Dunwoody the Region 6-AAAA victory.

The Lady Wildcats’ Senior Night opponent didn’t go as quietly into defeat as the first time around, as Dunwoody (8-15, 5-10 region) defeated a young Lakeside team by 35 points back in December.

“You can’t take a team for granted,” Dunwoody coach Angela Nash said. “You can’t live off of what happened the first time around, so every game you’ve got to come ready to play. … Hats off to Lakeside because they fought back.” 

Lakeside (3-19, 1-15) scored six straight points in the final minutes to come back and put itself in position to steal the win. After Dunwoody’s Kelly Dwyer hit two straight jumpers from the free-throw line, the Lady Wildcats held a 36-29 lead with 2:45 remaining. But Lakeside regrouped after a timeout, getting three steals on consecutive possessions and converting all of them into points. Janelly Plummer cut the deficit to one point after the third Dunwoody turnover in that sequence, laying it in off a nice feed from Suzanne Boden with under a minute to go.

Lakeside got its chance at a last-possession win after Dunwoody’s mid-court inbounds pass with 18.6 seconds to go sailed out of bounds without being touched. With no time off the clock, Lakeside brought the ball down and kept possession after a tie ball. Suzanne Boden’s baseline inbounds pass with four seconds to go then went to Burks for the last-second attempt.

“Ugly or not, a win is a win,” Nash said. “So we definitely appreciate (our players’) intensity and desire to hold on to it.”

Both teams missed opportunities to take control of the game in a tightly contested second half. Lakeside suffered from careless passing and turnovers, while Dunwoody failed to extend its third-quarter lead by missing a handful of consecutive easy shots. By the end of the third, Lakeside had recovered from a five-point halftime deficit to trail just 28-27 heading into the final period.

Dwyer joined Cynthia Onyeneho, both seniors, as the Lady Wildcats’ leading scorer with eight points, while Nicolette Wise and Jacque Jordan each scored six. 
Along with Dwyer and Onyeneho, Jazmine Coats, Charene Maker, Breci Davis and Camille Wingo were honored on a winning Senior Night that Nash described as “bittersweet.”

Lakeside’s Kadijah Howell-El turned in another outstanding performance with a game-high 17 points, nine of which came in the first quarter. Gabrielle Burks had eight points for the Lady Vikings.

Dunwoody hosts Southwest DeKalb on Saturday at 5:30 p.m. for the final regular season game; Lakeside has concluded its regular season, and both teams will await their opening round assignments in next week's region tournament.