<p>If anyone out there is tired of reading about how difficult it is to score against the Center Grove girls basketball team, they’ll need to do a better job of creating a different narrative.</p>
<p>The Trojans turned in another lockdown performance on Saturday night, smothering host Indian Creek 53-32 in the championship game of the Johnson County tournament.</p>
<p>Center Grove (6-1) allowed just 16 points over the first 26 and a half minutes of action.</p>
<p>"It doesn’t really matter what you do offensively if you can do that," Center Grove coach Kevin Stuckmeyer said.</p>[sc:text-divider text-divider-title="Story continues below gallery" ]Click here to purchase photos from this gallery
<p>The tone was set early when the Trojans forced turnovers on Indian Creek’s first four possessions. Those takeaways helped the visitors build an 11-0 advantage over the first five minutes of the game.</p>
<p>"We knew with them scouting our offense, we needed to start from the defense and it would help our offense," said Center Grove guard Alainna Frankel, who had six points and five of her team’s 14 steals on the night. "So we really tried to focus on our defense and not let them back-cut us, because we knew that’s what they were going to do."</p>
<p>The Braves kept the margin in that range for much of the rest of the half, but the Trojans put together another nine-point surge over the last 2:24 of the half, stretching the lead out to 27-9 on an Aili Lothamer layup just before the buzzer.</p>
<p>After Ali Harris’ bucket with 4:47 left in the second quarter, Indian Creek was held scoreless for a span of seven minutes and 55 seconds.</p>
<p>"We sometimes have trouble scoring, so our defense just gives us confidence to stay in the game," Center Grove junior Mary Wilson said.</p>
<p>Both teams started to heat up from downtown over the final four minutes to inflate the score a bit, but Indian Creek still couldn’t lop much off of the deficit, which grew as large as 27 points in the fourth period.</p>
<p>Wilson finished with a game-high 18 points for the Trojans, with half of those coming during the decisive opening quarter. Freshman Ella Hobson added 10 points off the bench, all in the second half, to help secure the team’s fourth consecutive county title.</p>
<p>"We talk all the time about, not everybody gets a chance to play for championships," Stuckmeyer said, "and we can’t take that for granted, and some of our seniors and juniors really set that tone this evening with it. It’s always good for younger girls to kind of see what the taste is like."</p>
<p>Harris led the Braves (3-2) with 11 points.</p>
<p>Center Grove advanced to the final with a 64-44 victory over Greenwood in the morning. Wilson and Lothamer scored 17 points each for the Trojans, while Brooklyn Stubblefield paced the Woodmen (1-5) with 20 points.</p>
<p>In the second semifinal, Indian Creek held off Edinburgh, 71-62, behind 23 points from Hannah Grider, 15 from Emily Todor and 14 from Harris.</p>
<p>For the Lancers (4-1), senior Destiney Ramey poured in a game-high 31 and collected her 1,000th career point on a second-quarter layup. Haven Link added 12 in the loss.</p>
