Prep girls basketball Class AAA final: Wayne hounds Nitro to claim first state title

And now Wayne has the privilege of calling itself, for the first time, the state champion.

The Pioneers dethroned Nitro 56-39 in the WVSSAC Class AAA tournament final to win their first state title on Saturday afternoon at the Charleston Coliseum & Convention Center.

Wayne’s defensive mixture of a zone in the halfcourt and pressure from all over befuddled the defending champ Wildcats into a 30.4% shooting performance from the field, including 23.1% from 3-point range, and 18 turnovers — all but two of which were steals.

Nitro’s Bri Gibson downed 6 of 10 floor shots and 4 of 6 triples for 16 points. The rest of the Wildcats were 8 for 36 on field goals and 2 of 20 on treys.

“Gibson hurt us,” Wayne coach Wade Williamson said, “but we came into the game thinking if we could keep [Brooklyn] Cawley and Natalie [Smith] down, we would have had a really good chance of winning, and for us to hold Natalie to four [points] is just completely awesome.”

The Pioneers didn’t settle just for making life difficult for the high-octane Smith and Cawley, who tallied five points. Wayne applied the same hassle when it had the ball, using penetration to earn quality looks and free throws.

The Pioneers’ Jayce Sammons pitched in a game-high 22 points en route to tournament MVP honors. She made 10 of 12 free throws. Brooke Adkins added 16 points and Mikayla Stacy scored seven, including back-to-back buckets in the third-quarter surge in which Wayne pulled away.

“They took us out of our game,” Nitro coach Pat Jones said of the Pioneers. “We settled for way too many outside shots today. We didn’t play our type of game, where we want to get the ball into the post, and it showed.

“[Wayne] took our game and played our game plan, basically. They got to the basket, got to the foul line and made their free throws. We shot six free throws to their 22. That’s a big difference in the game.”

Despite straggling to a nine-point deficit at halftime, Nitro (21-5) cut its deficit to four points twice early in the third quarter. The second time was on Gibson’s 3 with 4:51 to go in the third frame, which indicated the Wildcats weren’t going anywhere.

So the Pioneers ran away and hid with a 14-2 run encompassing the rest of the third quarter.

It began with Stacy’s step-through move to split two Nitro defenders in the lane, and the next trip down, Stacy converted Adkins’ behind-the-back transition pass into a layup.

Sammons got free backdoor for a lay-in, Adkins splashed in a 3 and after Sammons hit four free throws in the final 30.6 seconds of the third, Wayne was up 16 and well on its way to wearing the crown.

“We were able to keep the pressure on [Nitro] not only defensively,” Williamson said, “but we kept pressing them offensively from the standpoint of, we kept pushing the ball at them.

“We didn’t run a whole lot of sets today. We kept pushing the ball at them and trying to get backdoors and things to take advantage of what they were doing.”

It worked well enough for the Pioneers to extend their lead to 20 on two occasions in the fourth quarter.

Williamson conceded that might “seem crazy” coming into the game, considering the Pioneers and Wildcats played to a 10-point margin in the 2024 state semifinals and a 30-25 decision on Jan. 24 — both won by Nitro.

But he had no questions about the legitimacy of the result, and suggested it was fueled at least in part by those prior losses to their Cardinal Conference foe.

“I don’t want to act like we knew we could beat them by 20 or anything like that,” Williamson said, “but I think we knew ... we have the better team, and we had the better team, and we just had to go make sure we could go do that on a daily basis. And we tried to do that in practice when nobody was watching.

“I think that’s when you get better. You get better when nobody’s watching you, and I think that’s what we tried to do. We just kept our head down, and we lost a couple games this year that were close and tight against very good teams, and it never deterred us. I think that shows our character and maturity.”

Sammons put the Pioneers (22-4) ahead to stay with a 3-pointer 11 seconds into the second quarter. She added another one while falling to the floor about three and a half minutes later and turned it into a four-point play.

“It’s always great to make an and-one 3,” Sammons said, “but when we’re shooting, we’re always trying to get in a rhythm, and when one of us gets in the rhythm, we usually all try to get in it.

“And I’m just really proud of all of us. It’s not about me, it’s about the team, and I’m really proud of all of us.”

Sammons and Adkins each had five steals and Lexi Blankenship cleared eight rebounds for Wayne.

Though Smith struggled by her lofty standards offensively, she cleared 13 rebounds for Nitro.

The Wildcats now go back to being the proverbial hunter after being the hunted in what Jones termed an “exhausting” season of taking every opponent’s best shot.

They stayed for the Pioneers’ award ceremony on the court after the game in order to find fuel for that pursuit.

“I wanted them to sit out there and see [Wayne] get their plaques,” Jones said. “I want them to experience it because I don’t want them to hopefully ever have to feel it again. I want them to come back with energy in a month or two and get back in the gym, know what we need to work on. ... Hopefully by June, when the three-week period or shootouts come around, these girls think back to whatever today is, March 15, and realize, we want to win a state championship, this is what we’ve gotta do.”

Stacy, Addie Adkins and Brooke Adkins made the all-tournament team from Wayne, joined by Nitro’s Cawley and Smith, Greenbrier East’s Ava Workman and Grafton’s Hadley Horne.