First time girls basketball champion to be crowned as University takes on Delta

DENVER – Delta isn’t ready to go home. Not by a long shot.

Two days after the Panthers reach their first Final 4 in their girls basketball team’s history, they doubled down and beat Timnath 56-46 for a chance to return to Denver Coliseum for one last game on the official last day of the basketball season.

A Class 4A girls basketball state championship opportunity is firmly in their grasp.

“This is my third year coming [to the Coliseum] and the past two years, we’ve always lost,” senior Breezy Huff said. “I wasn’t about that. I’ve watch so many Delta teams come here and make it and I was not going to let that happen.”

So she took matters into her own hands. She scored a career-high 27 points and pulled down nine rebounds. She went 3-for-4 from 3-point range, a shot that the Panthers as a whole have been somewhat inconsistent with throughout the season.

“Once we see the first one go through, it’s just that same motion again and again,” Huff said. “Once we get that, we’re kind of unstoppable.”

Getting to that unstoppable stage took a bit of time. Leading 15-8 in the first quarter, the Cubs slowly erased that lead and pulled ahead by six points going into halftime. At the break, the Panthers just assessed the mistakes that were made and addressed perhaps their biggest lapse in that eight-minute stretch where Timinath pulled ahead.

“We had to get out on the 3’s,” Taylor Somers said. “They’re an incredible 3-point shooting team so we had to to guard on them and make sure to box out so they couldn’t get second-chance opportunities.”

The Panthers limited the Cubs to just three offensive rebounds all game so this second-chance opportunities were severely limited.

The Panthers move on to the 4A title game, which will be played at 10 a.m. on Saturday at Denver Coliseum. It will be the first of six championship games to be played at the venue.

And it will also be one last moment for the Panthers to enjoy competing on the state stage as a team. Huff is a three-sport athlete at Delta and has only competed at state track. Competing in a big arena alongside her friends has her pumped for what’s ahead in less than 24 hours.

“We’re not just here, we’re here to win,” she said. “The more we play, the more this is our game and we are here to win.”

(1) University 53, (4) Holy Family 45

By Matt Meyer

Even as the pace swung from blazing fast to a grinding crawl, Janay Kravig found ways to score.

The University junior finished with 22 points from all over the floor to pace the top-seeded Bulldogs in a 53-45 win over No. 4 Holy Family.

The scoring came in handy, too, because even though University executed well on both ends, Bulldogs coach Matt Baumgartner said his team had to survive 13 offensive rebounds from the Tigers.

“They’re scrappy and you have to give them a ton of credit,” Baumgartner said. “They missed a lot of shots that they’d normally make and they got second and third chances. But that’s something we can clean up for tomorrow, because luckily for us there is a tomorrow.”

While University had the hotter start, both teams were cruising in the first quarter, with the Bulldogs shooting 63.6% from the field and Tigers shooting 50%. Scoring slowed down for both teams in the second quarter, which in turn allowed Holy Family to turn a four-point deficit to a 30-30 tie at half.

By the third quarter, the teams entered a stretch with four lead changes and three times, with the margin not moving to multiple possessions until Addison Harding spun in for layup with 1:17 to go.

Beyond Kravig’s scoring, Harding finished with nine points for the Bulldogs, while Maddie McNair and Natalie Galindo has six points apiece. Alexcia Oaxaca paced Holy Family with 13 points and Alyssa Quintana had 12 points.

Tomorrow, University will attempt to win its first championship in program history, having twice finished as runner-up in 2022 and 1985.

“There’s an unbelievable amount of faith that I have in this group,” Baumgartner said. “These seniors played in the state championship game during their freshman year, so it’s not new to them. We’re excited for it because they’ve worked really, really hard all season to get here.”