HURON — The third time was most definitely charmed for Rapid City Stevens.
The Raider girls squared off with second-seeded Sioux Falls Roosevelt for the third time this season on Thursday at the Huron Arena and used a second-half comeback to come away with a 56-52 triumph.
It was the No. 7 seed’s first win over the Rough Riders in those games and the team’s first win at state since 2003.
“We finally just made some shots,” Stevens head coach Donavan DeBoer said. “We knocked down some baskets, and they missed a few.”
The Raiders got off to an awful start, turning the ball over a couple of times and hoisting three air-ball jumpers in the first few minutes, but junior Allyx Deneke scored all seven of the Raiders’ first-quarter points to settle her team down.
“She was huge,” DeBoer said of his junior guard. “She was coming off of a five-game layoff after her knee injury the last time we played them, and she made a huge difference tonight.”
Although Deneke was big for Stevens in the first quarter, senior forward Justine Blade carried the Raiders in the second, scoring 11 of her 18 points in the stanza. The Raiders needed all of those points to stay within shouting distance. Despite shooting just 26 percent from the floor in the first half, Stevens trailed just 29-23.
“That’s what we kept telling them at halftime,” DeBoer said. “We couldn’t make anything in the first half, and we were still in the game. We told our guards to just keep shooting and they’d start to fall.”
The Raiders eventually got some perimeter shots to fall, but it was sophomore sensation Margaret McCloud who put her stamp on the game in the second half.
The ambidextrous forward scored 14 of her game-high 19 points in the second half and routinely came up with huge baskets when her team needed them most.
“We worked so hard to get here,” McCloud said. “To get this first one, our emotions are just so … we’re just speechless.”
The Raiders tied the game at 37 with 1:10 to go in the third quarter when things started to spiral out of control for the Rough Riders. Roosevelt turned the ball over on its next possession, and McCloud scored to make it 39-37.
Roosevelt head coach Chris Clark then picked up a technical foul, and Blade hit a free throw to give Stevens a 40-37 lead at the end of the third.
The Raiders fell behind 49-48 with two minutes to play when Kaitlyn Wright hit her only shot of the game — a gigantic 3-pointer from the left wing that gave her team a 51-49 lead. The Raiders never trailed after that.
The Raiders (15-8 overall) will take on Rapid City Central in a semifinal tonight at 7:45 p.m. It will be the fourth meeting of the year for the two schools, with Central having won two of the previous three meetings.
