Girls basketball: Kayley Downie, Easthampton hold off Hampshire Regional at PV Tip-Off (PHOTOS)

AMHERST — Kayley Downie couldn’t help but have flashbacks.

The Easthampton point guard was a member of the Eagles team that almost lost its big lead against Hampshire Regional in the Pioneer Valley Tip-Off Classic one year ago.

And on Friday afternoon at the Mullins Center, Downie could sense the same situation unfolding – once again playing Hampshire. Except this time, she wasn’t going to let the lead slip too far out of control.

The senior guard drilled three 3-pointers en route to a game-high 18 points, and added seven rebounds and two steals in Easthampton’s 42-33 win over the Raiders to improve to 2-0 on the year.

“I kept telling them to stay focused and stay calm, pretend like we’ve been up the same amount we were,” Downie said, referring to the message she gave her teammates. “We kept fighting and fighting and hung on. Last year we were up, and they came back and made it a five-point game with seconds left. We were like, ‘this can’t happen again.’”

Her efforts were good for Player of the Game honors on Friday. Downie received a trophy and a T-shirt. She grew up watching games at the PVTO as a young girl with hoop dreams. And now, those dreams have come true.

“It feels really good, and it’s kind of like a dream honestly,” Downie said. “When I was younger, I used to come here and watch high-schoolers play, so coming here and winning this is so awesome. As a senior, this is a great way to go out – last game playing here.”

The key stretch of the game came in the first few minutes of the third quarter. The Raiders closed the first half on a 6-0 run to make it 20-12 at the break, but Easthampton seized momentum out of the gate with an 8-0 spurt of its own to give the Eagles a comfortable advantage.

“It was good to come out and extend [the lead] like that,” Eagles head coach Brian Miller said. “Now we just have to learn that when you have a 16-point lead with eight minutes to go, we can’t take shots five seconds into the shot clock. That’s all just learning and what we have to keep working on in practice.”

Those rushed shots are exactly what let Hampshire work its way back in the mix. The Raiders out-scored Easthampton 13-4 in the fourth quarter, and their defensive pressure – which rushed Easthampton more than it wanted – had a lot to do with that discrepancy.

Hampshire JV coach Matt LaCoille filled in on varsity Friday, as head coach Sydney Cloutier missed the game due to illness. LaCoille decided to go with a press in the final frame, and after seeing the success it had, wishes he had started it earlier.

Regardless, he was happy to see how Hampshire responded to what was as big as an 18-point deficit.

“Our team is full of girls who care, and they do everything they’re asked to do,” LaCoille said. “Honestly, it’s on me as a coach. We started pressing them a little bit more at the end, and we got some good pressure on them. I wish we could’ve done that earlier. But our girls in general, they work hard. It doesn’t matter the score.”

Shayne Moynahan (12 points) and Alice Jenkins (nine) led the Raiders in scoring on Friday, with Kat Simmons adding four points and a team-high eight rebounds.

While Hampshire would have liked to win the game, the overall experience of playing at UMass was still an unforgettable one.

“It’s definitely neat, and for a lot of players, this is kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” LaCoille said. “It’s the size of the venue, the scale of it, everything. Even though there aren’t thousands of people in the crowd, just the overall environment of being on a college court, a Division 1 court, it’s really neat. They’ll be able to look back fondly on this memory.”

Joining Downie in double figures for the Eagles was Sophia Faginski. The senior forward is one of the veterans on Easthampton, and Miller knows she can be a force in the paint on both sides of the ball.

Now, the Eagles just need to run more offensive sets for her, as most of her 11 points came via her five offensive rebounds.

“She’s such a strong kid, we feel like we can utilize her more,” Miller said. “If we get the ball inside to her, we can let her use her post moves because mostly she’s doing damage on rebounds and things like that. We wanna kind of incorporate her more into our offense. She just keeps plugging away. She’s basically the backbone to our defense.”

Easthampton (2-0) returns to action on Tuesday against Hopkins Academy. Until then, Miller is going to ensure his team takes better care of the basketball by working on it during practice.

“It’s still early in the year, so we have a lot to improve on, but we won and that’s all that matters,” Miller said. “I thought we threw the ball around too much, which we try not to do. It’s a tough venue to come in and play. [Downie] shot well, but we just seemed not very aggressive.”

Hampshire (1-1) travels to South Hadley on Tuesday, looking to take the positive momentum established in the fourth quarter of Friday’s game and use it moving forward.