BENTONVILLE -- The defensive clamps Bentonville's girls put on Rogers in the second half allowed the Lady Tigers to tighten their grip on second place in the 6A-West Conference standings.
Bentonville held Rogers to just two field goals over the final 14 minutes and used a 15-0 run to take the lead en route to a 55-49 victory Friday night over the Lady Mounties in Tiger Arena.
The Lady Tigers (17-7, 9-3) maintain their one-game lead over Rogers Heritage with two games left against Springdale and Fort Smith Southside, the bottom two teams in the league standings. A combination of Bentonville wins and Heritage losses equalling two would give the Lady Tigers the No. 2 seed for the Class 6A state tournament and a first-round bye.
"It's good for us to be sitting at 9-3 in the conference this late in the year," Bentonville coach Tom Halbmaier said. "And 100 percent of the credit goes to this team. It's something they have worked hard for, and everybody -- from player 1 to player 18 -- had a hand in this team's success."
Things didn't look promising for Bentonville when Abby Harris' bucket with 32 seconds before halftime gave Rogers (13-12, 7-5) a 24-22 halftime lead. The Lady Mounties extended that to 36-27 when Harris hit two free throws with 5:19 left in the third quarter, but they didn't score again for almost 8 minutes.
That allowed the Lady Tigers to make their move. Bentonville closed out the third quarter with 13 unanswered points for a 40-36 edge, then Jada Brown extended the string on a bucket with 6:56 remaining.
"It was one of those deals when they were getting to the rim pretty good, so we had to help our guards a little bit," Halbmaier said. "Our post players did a great job of doing that, and we just slowed them down and got some turnovers. They started figuring that out, so we had to go back to man in the second half.
"I was proud of the team. With Senior Night and all the emotions, stuff like that, I was proud of them to pull out a victory."
Brown finished with 26 points in her final home game, and 11 of those came in the fourth quarter as Bentonville led by as much as eight points late in the game. Aubrey Treadwell had 16 points, including a 10-for-10 outing at the free-throw line, to lead Rogers, while Ava Maner added 10.