Earning their spot in the state tournament, girls’ basketball defeated the Midlothian Panthers 48-43 in triple overtime to claim the 5A Region II Championship title on Saturday.

“Once you’re in it you don’t really feel the nerves that much to be quite honest,” head girls’ basketball coach Ross Reedy said. “I think that if there was any point of which it was nerve wracking it would’ve been when we were down 4 points with 19.3 seconds left. We had fouled them in the first overtime and this was the only overtime that despite being behind, it was the one that we were really down big with very little time left.” 

Tying the game at the end of the fourth 36-36, both teams went into overtime to tie the score yet again 42-42. 

“It was tiring but I think we needed it to make sure we got the win in the end,” junior Maya Jain said. “We really just played together and knew that this is something that all of us wanted and we weren’t going to stop until we got it. We came together and just knew that we were playing for something big.”

Finishing in double overtime 45-45, Lady Panthers and Redhawks played on to finally wrap up the game. The girls’ scored 9 in triple OT as Midlothian fell short, only scoring 4.

“Going into triple overtime we knew we needed to finish this,” junior Lilly Ziemkiewicz said. “We changed our offensive plan to a dribble drive look and tried to hold the ball when we were up and score when we needed to. At the end we tried to rebound and make our free throws.”

Sophomore Jazzy Owens-Barnett dropped 22 points, averaging a total of 18.3 points per game in the Redhawks 3-0 playoff run.

“The feeling going into the third overtime was actually very calm,” Owens said. “We’ve been there before so everybody just gave each other a look and really locked in. In the last minutes shots just fell for us because they were a great team and the ball just favored us more. We felt really good afterwards but we’re ready to get back and watch film to win the whole thing this weekend.”