Lady Eagles basketball headed to state tournament for first time since the 2021-22 season

WARNER ROBINS — For the first time since the 2021-22 season, the Northside Lady Eagles will be headed to the state playoffs after a 52-22 win over the Thomas County Central Lady Yellow Jackets on Tuesday.

Three observations from the opener of Region 2-5A’s play-in games:

Defense is discipline

The Lady Eagles have built their identity on being a scrappy, defensively sound team under coach ChoRhonda Gwaltney-Harris.

In their first postseason game it showed as they held the Lady Yellow Jackets to 22 points, a new season low and just one of many low-scoring games from their opponents this year.

They’ve held opposing teams under 30 points seven times this year, under 40 points 10 times and under 50 points 14 times.

They did it against Thomas County Central by maintaining full court pressure and taking advantage of poor ball security. When the Lady Yellow Jackets attempted to get to the basket or inside the arc at all, the Lady Eagles collapsed poked the ball loose on possession after possession.

Even though the offense comes slowly with this team, their defensive identity is what’s gotten them to their most wins since the 2019-20 season.

“I wanna say, one, [Thomas County Central has] a lot of injuries going on, too, so let me put it out there that I think they’re better than what they showed out there tonight,” Gwaltney-Harris said. “But my kids showed resilience, they played hard. The first time we played them we put them at the free throw line. They scored 24 points and 14 of them were all at the free throw line. So our thought today was get our hands out.”


“We still didn’t get them out like I wanted to, but we got our hands out, we boxed out. We didn’t give them a lot of second shots. We made them take hard shots, and we moved our feet and communicated tonight.”

Preparing for the “real” postseason

There’s no question that the region tournament, especially the play-in round, is the “real” postseason. However, the Northside girls are used to this game.

For the last couple of years they’ve got to this game lost, and had their season end. To that extent it can almost feel like an extension of the regular season.

But now the Lady Eagles are headed for the real deal — the state tournament. They’re playing with house money in Gwaltney-Harris’s first season, and they’re as ready as they’re going to be according to her.

“You gotta be tough to be in the postseason, that’s just what it is,” Gwaltney-Harris said. “It’s really not about getting them ready now, it’s have we been getting ready all year long for this. I’m not sure, but I know that my kids are as tough as they’re gonna be at the moment. It takes more than a year to get tough. We got a long ways to go but we’ve come a long ways.”

A far cry from the summer

Looking back to the summer scrimmages, it was clear Gwaltney-Harris had her work cut out for her.

The on-court product looked rough to say the least, but even then you could tell the air was different. More laughs, more smiles and certainly more dissatisfied remarks from the Northside bench as turnovers piled up.

The Lady Eagles are still a long way from where they want to be, but watching them against Thomas County Central was night and day. One of the things that’s different from eight months ago — discipline.

“Defense is discipline. Moving your feet and not your hands is discipline. Being able to do what you’re asked to do. That’s probably the biggest place we’ve grown is being able to do what I ask them to do instead of what they wanna do or what they used to do,” Gwaltney-Harris said. “[Last summer] they just didn’t understand, and so they’re grasping concepts of basketball…they don’t play outside of here, so we haven’t played enough basketball to know basketball. So that’s been the growth is figuring out what we can do and what we’re able to…”

UP NEXT

The Lady Eagles will play Coffee next in the Region 2-5A Final Four at Lee County High School on Thursday, Feb. 13 at 7 p.m.