COLUMBIA—Blythewood’s girls basketball team fell behind early against Wando Friday night at Colonial Life Arena.
That deficit didn’t bother the Bengals for long. They quickly overcame an 8-point deficit and used their pressure defense to finish with a 68-44 victory that clinched the team’s second straight 5A Division I state championship.
“It’s definitely surreal,” head coach Emily McElveen-Schaeffer said. “These girls and these coaches trusted the program, trusted the process, and they deserve this moment more than anything else.”
Seniors Chase Thomas and India Williams led the way for the Bengals. Thomas finished the night with 28 points and 11 rebounds, while Williams scored 20 points and pulled down 10 boards.
“It feels amazing,” Thomas said. “We started in June and have been playing together ever since. It was a rough start to the season, but we picked it up and we’ve been doing it ever since.”
Blythewood (24-5) opened the season 1-3 with losses to Camden, Dorman, and North Augusta before going 24-2 the rest of the way.
“We’ve had chemistry over the years and it just felt great to continue that,” Williams said about playing with Thomas. “I’m going to miss playing with her next year.”
Thomas signed to play for South Carolina State and Williams signed with USC-Aiken.
“Both of them are very good players. They’ve put their name in the history books of Blythewood High School,” McElveen-Schaeffer said. “They both stepped up at the right moment, as they told me they would. They’ve been here before, and I trust them.”
Two other seniors were key in securing the victory. Hayley Hightower, the veteran point guard whom McElveen-Schaeffer said has sparked the defensive effort for years, had eight steals and five assists on top of five points. Madison Thomas, Chase’s sister, had two steals and two assists with four points.
“I don’t care about points, I just wanted my team to win,” said Hightower, who likely played her last basketball game. “I knew that I needed to do whatever I had to do to get my team to get the Dub.”
Hightower, a sprinter for Blythewood’s state champion girls track and field team, signed to run for Purdue.
After last year’s state title win, the seniors on the team were dead set on winning another before they graduated.
“That was their goal, to go back-to-back,” McElveen-Schaeffer said. “They decided themselves: ‘We’re tired of losing, we don’t want to lose anymore.”
Wando’s Makenna Reynolds, who finished the night with 19 points, scored nine points over the first eight minutes to vault the Warriors to a 17-9 lead.
Blythewood’s defense awakened in the second quarter and stepped up the pressure. From that point on, the Bengals’ points flowed.
Hightower made three of four free throws and Thomas sank a 3-pointer to get the Bengals to within 17-15 at the 6:36 mark of the second quarter.
The game stayed tight up to halftime. Williams broke a 27-27 tie with a 3-pointer with 23 seconds left to give the Bengals a 30-27 lead at intermission.
Blythewood took its defensive pressure to a higher level the rest of the way.
The Bengals outscored the Warriors 38-17 and held them to just 7-for-24 shooting.
“We just stayed together, passed the ball to the open person and we made the shots,” Thomas said, adding that she and her teammates felt that winning vibe in the midst of a third-quarter run. “It was a surreal feeling, knowing that we were going to win again.”
Wando (22-7) opened the third quarter with a McKevitt free throw and a basket from Reynolds to tie the game at 30, and after Hightower made a basket, Emry Crawford tied the game again at 32.
Blythewood scored seven points in quick succession in the space of a minute. After the 5-minute mark of the third, Williams made one of two foul shots, Thomas drained a 3, and Williams returned to the basket for a 3-point play with 4:04 left.
Hightower may not have scored the points, but her defensive stances as a point guard led to a number of steals that her teammates capitalized on.
“It was me being active on the ball,” Hightower said. “I knew I got a little happy and got into foul trouble, but I’m just so glad we were able to win.”
The Bengals finished the third quarter leading 48-36, and outscored Wando 20-8 in the final eight minutes.
Wando, which rallied against Lexington from a 28-15 halftime deficit to beat the Wildcats in the Lower State final, had its season end with a loss, but 11th-year head coach Jeff Emory said that his Warriors proved critics wrong all year and finished high.
“Nobody wants to lose the last game, they want to win it and that’s what we prepare for all year,” Emory said. “We’ll be back. We have a young team, but if you call this year a failure, you’re not paying attention. We weren’t ranked at the beginning of the year, nobody ever seems to give us credit at the beginning of the season. Two or three weeks in we beat a ranked team and we kept going and going and going, and from there we stayed in the top 10 all year long. I couldn’t be more proud of them. I think they’ve earned everybody’s respect.”
Blythewood’s road to state took a grinding turn after the team’s second-round home victory over Clover. The fourth-seeded Bengals hit the road Feb. 27 to play No. 1 Dorman, which beat them 61-49 in the second game of the season. Blythewood led the third-round matchup 47-37 going into the fourth quarter and held off a strong Cavaliers rally to win 54-52.
That victory put Blythewood on the road again—to the Upper State championship at Newberry High School to face No. 2 Mauldin. The Bengals battled the Mavericks tightly through three quarters. It was not until Thomas took to the foul line and made four of six shots in the final two minutes to give her team a needed cushion in the 60-54 victory.
“They were definitely close games,” Thomas said. “I felt we had the toughest schedule out of everybody and we pulled it off. I feel like people believed that we couldn’t do it, and we pulled it off and now we’re champions.”
Added Williams, “I think it just built us for this moment. Those games were harder than (the state final), so just knowing that we went through those hard games, the adversity, the road and all that, I think it just built us for this moment.”
Even so, McElveen-Schaeffer impressed to her team that Wando’s ability to play hard and rally illustrated that strong seasons and state championships are earned, not just expected.
“That’s what I challenged them with,” she said. “Wando in their last game came from behind to beat Lexington, and I told them that they could come back. That’s a good basketball team. You’ve got to compete every day. You don’t just walk on the court and beat somebody.”
Three years ago, McElveen-Schaeffer took over a program that went 0-19 in 2021-2022 and had little history of success. Now that the program owns back-to-back state championships, she said attracting talented players to come to Blythewood will be a stronger sell.
“Winning breeds winning,” she said. “When people see what we’ve done, they’re more eager to come here. They want to be a part of that, they want to see that.”
WANDO – 17-10-9-8—44
BLYTHEWOOD – 9-21-18-20—68
WANDO
Makenna Reynolds 19, McKevitt 9, Crawford 8, Mazyck 4, Rush 3, Lovis 1.
BLYTHEWOOD
Chase Thomas 28, India Williams 20, Fulton 8, M. Thomas 4, Hightower 5, Stovall 3.
