Bearcats Upend Eagles in Quarterfinals

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YAKIMA — For 24 minutes, it looked like a near carbon-copy of the matchup at Ridgefield between the No. 4 W.F. West girls basketball team and No. 3 Hudson’s Bay went a few weeks ago. 

The Bearcats struggled to find consistent scoring, and tied up a 30-30 entering the fourth, it was anyone’s game. 

This time around though, in the 2A State Quarterfinals Thursday at the Yakima Valley SunDome under the bright lights, the Bearcats rose to the occasion. W.F. West rattled off a 7-0 run to start the fourth, after a Lexi Roberts trey, and two fastbreak layups, and held on for a 48-41 victory to move into the state semifinals Friday. 

It’s W.F. West’s first semifinal appearance since it won a state championship in 2018.

“We’re really excited, last year was very frustrating because there was no state tournament and we thought we had a team that could get to this,” Bearcats coach Kyle Karnofski said. “We had two seniors that did everything for us. This group, they put it on themselves to do this too, they wanted it. They felt like last year could have been us.”

The Bearcats will play No. 2 Ellensburg in the semifinals, a rematch of a 2020 regional round matchup that W.F. West won. 

W.F. West shot just 30.6% as a team, but held the Eagles to 22.6% shooting. Drea Brumfield led the Bearcats with an efficient 18 points, 10 rebounds, and two blocks, and Julia Dalan added six key points and seven rebounds off the bench. 

Brumfield, Dalan, and Makayla Mencke were the only Bearcats with a field goal percentage above 50%. 

“I’ve liked how she’s been attacking,” Karnofski said of Brumfield. “She got downhill, she didn’t settle, and she didn’t let them dictate how she played. That’s been big for her.” 

The win also means the Bearcats avenged a 33-30 defeat at the hands of Hudson’s Bay a few weeks ago, another slugfest that didn’t go W.F. West’s way in the district semifinals. 

But rather than focus on getting revenge, the Bearcats and Karnofski put the emphasis on themselves. 

“We were frustrated with that because we felt like we didn’t play well,” he said. “You make a couple shots and we play for a district title. We didn’t have the same mindset that we had today. We wanted to prove that wasn’t us, that’s the way we’ve been about it.”

It’s losses like that, and a regional round defeat to No. 5 Archbishop Murphy last week, that have fueled the Bearcats to bigger and better results in the most important week of the season. After not playing their style, tempo, or brand of basketball in those losses, W.F. West has completely flipped the script in Yakima. 

“A lot of people probably didn’t pick W.F. West when they saw the bracket coming in,” Karnofski said. “There’s a lot of good teams, any matchup we get, we have size, we have speed, our girls are deliberate with what they do.”