The Kake Lady Thunderbirds are the 1A Region V Basketball champions.

Kake beat the Angoon Lady Eagles 53 – 37 in the title game Friday night at the BJ McGillis Gym in Sitka.

1A Championship Slideshow


(All photos KCAW/Robert Woolsey)

The Kake girls led the entire game. But head coach Lloyd Davis says you can never ease up on a team like Angoon. The Kake girls went into a man-to-man full court press from the opening tip-off.

“We wanted to change up our game plan. I don’t like running the same defense and offense from one game to the next. I try to mix it up as much as I can. We started up with something a little different, rather than a zone press, we went into a full court man-to-man.”

Once the Lady Thunderbirds established a lead, they dropped back into a more conventional 2-1-2 zone defense, and kept the Lady Eagles off the basket for much of the game.

Jackie Bennum was the top scorer for the Lady Thunderbirds with 21 points — 10 field goals and a free throw. Patricia O’Brien led the Lady Eagles with 15.

This is Lloyd Davis’s second year as head coach in Kake, and his second trip to the state tournament. The Lady Thunderbirds were eliminated in their first two games last year. Davis says both he and his team will be more prepared this time around.

“The style of ball up there is a lot different from down here in Southeast Alaska, and we got a taste of that last year.”

The Angoon Lady Eagles went on to lose again against Yakutat, who will now take the second berth at the state tournament next week.

In the boys’ championship game Friday night, Kake fell to the Klawock Chieftans, 56 – 40. Fans who piled into the BJ McGillis Gym to watch the title contest saw two different basketball games: In the first half, the Thunderbirds closed down Klawock’s offense, and ran up an 8-point lead by the buzzer.

But the Chieftans emerged from the locker room a transformed team.

Head coach Doug Edenshaw encouraged his players to focus.

“It was totally different in the first half. We weren’t playing our game, we weren’t running anything. We just went in at halftime and said, Look it’s the same as at home, you’ve just got to settle down and run your plays, and we’ll get through it.”

Klawock’s Josh Marvin found the basket at the start of the second half, and he and Dylan George began play-making that turned the game around. They finished with 27 and 15 points respectively.

The Klawock Chieftans are the defending 1A state champions. Edenshaw says this creates a touch of added pressure.

“We’ve got our work cut out for us. It’s going to be a battle. Especially going up there as the number 1 seed and repeating. It’s going to be tough.”

The Kake Thunderbirds subsequently lost the consolation championship to Angoon on Saturday evening. The Eagles will join Klawock representing Region V in the 1A/2A tournament, which opens at the Sullivan Arena in Anchorage on March 14.