Prairie junior Brooke Walling shots a pull-up jumper against Battle Ground earlier this season.
Last Friday evening, the Prairie High School girls basketball team blew out Fort Vancouver 83-9.
While the lopsided win didn’t lead to a large celebration, an earlier personal accomplishment in the game did.
Junior post Brooke Walling, although sitting out the entire fourth quarter, surpassed the 1,000-point mark for her career at Prairie. She finished the game with 23 points.
Walling’s point milestone comes just weeks after also recording her 500th rebound.
“That’s a huge accomplishment,” head coach Hala Corral said of the points milestone. “I don’t think people realize how big that is.”
Walling didn’t think she would hit the mark before her senior year, but said she’s glad to see a lot of hard work paying off.
As for what’s next, Walling is more focused on team accomplishments than hitting another scoring or rebounding mark.
“Just work hard, get my teammates open, and do what I need to do to get us to the dome and win a state championship,” she said.
Focused on state
Walling has been one part of Prairie’s overall dominance this season. The team sits atop the Greater St. Helen’s 3A league with a record of 7-0 and an overall record of 15-2.
Although the team has no seniors, Corral said she isn’t surprised by their performance this season and that filling the void of last year’s seniors has been an overall team effort.
“These kids work hard,” she said. “Our goal isn’t just league — our goal is to make a run at the state championship, and I think we have the right group to do that.”
To make that goal a reality, Corral just wants her squad to continue to play their own game during the last week of the regular season.
“When you play a team for a second time and you’ve already beat them by 50 or 60, it’s easy to get complacent,” she said. “These kids, this year, have decided not to get complacent. We set team goals and we go after the team goals each game. They don’t look at the scoreboard. They look at what they need to do to get better to get us where we want to be in February and March.”
