High school girls basketball: Bountiful takes care of business at Wasatch in rematch of last year’s 5A semifinal

In a much-anticipated showdown between 5A contenders on Wednesday night — a rematch in fact of last year’s semifinal — it took Bountiful a bit to get going, but once it did it never looked back.

Bountiful coach Joel Burton thought his players looked a bit fatigued in the opening minutes perhaps due to a game against Skyline the night before, but they settled in quick building a nine-point lead by the end of the quarter and never looked back on their way to the 56-46 win at Wasatch.

“I felt like our legs were tired as we started the game, and just took us a little while to kind of get into the flow of what we like to do. And just to see us kind of loosen up … and then the shots started dropping. And so it was just nice seeing our kids get flowing again last—there tonight,” said Burton.

Bountiful used balanced scoring to secure the win, with Ute signee Milika Satuala leading the way with 15 points, followed by Maleah Nelson with a dozen, Maile Murdock with 11 and Brynna Castleton with 10.

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“I’ll take that every game if I can get it. We’ve got some young kids that are definitely growing up and starting to take a little bit of the pressure off of that starting five, thank goodness. So it’s nice to see Miley and Peyton (Orchard) really starting to fill that role, and among many others that are starting to just get confident playing at the varsity level,” said Burton.

“We knew that was going to be the issue coming into the year was finding that group behind the first —behind our starting five, and we’re starting to figure that out."

Much of Bountiful’s damage was done in the first half, as it opened up a 16-7 lead after the first quarter and then stretched it to 21-7 at the 5:54 mark of the second quarter on a corner 3-pointer from the freshman Murdock, her third of the game.

Wasatch finally halted the Redhawks’ fast start to cut the lead to 10 by halftime.

By the end of the third quarter the deficit had shrunk to 38-31. The momentum didn’t last long for Wasatch. Aided by a Satuala 3-pointer early in the fourth quarter, Bountiful opened up its largest lead of the game with a 12-4 run to stretch the lead to 50-35.

Wasatch’s press caused some turnover issues late in the game for Bountiful, which saw its lead whittle to seven points in the final minute, but the Wasps ran out of time to cut into the lead another further as it fell to 10-2 on the season.

The win pushes three-time defending state champion Bountiful’s record to 8-1 on the season.