Staff photo / Brian Yauger Jackson-Milton junior Nora Schwarten puts up a shot during the first half of Thursday’s game against Mineral Ridge.

NORTH JACKSON — All season long, first-year Jackson-Milton coach Dan Turner has been wanting his girls to earn a “signature win” against one of the league’s top teams.

After losing by 27 points in the first meeting with Mineral Ridge, the Blue Jays got that signature win on Thursday, taking down the Rams, 48-45.

“That’s exactly what we wanted to do going into our last four games into the season. We want to win every game, but against those top-quality opponents, we definitely wanted to get a staple win going into the tournament, just to feel good about ourselves,” Turner said. “Whatever matchup we get in the tournament, now we know that we have the confidence and consistency to play at a high level.”

At the beginning of the game, however, things looked to be heading the other way. Jackson-Milton trailed 17-7 after the first, with the Blue Jays burning two timeouts in the process. If they struggled in the second quarter, Mineral Ridge was going to put them away.

But Jackson-Milton responded, outscoring the Rams 12-5 in the second. They trailed at the break, but had new life.

“Credit to our leaders, Emma, Johns, Amani Yasin, those girls have really taken on a leadership role, being vocal and making sure our girls are playing hard at a consistent level,” Turner said. “I just kept preaching that we’ve got to raise our intensity, raise our level, because Mineral Ridge is a very good team. They can shoot well, but if you don’t match their energy, it can get out of hand really quick.”

Yasin led the way with 22 points, including a late 3-pointer to give the Blue Jays a lead they wouldn’t surrender.

“It was only a matter of time for her to have a great breakout offensive game, and today was it,” Turner said. “With the weather hitting, our girls just couldn’t wait to get back in the gym. I could see that we had a bitter taste in our mouth from losing the last game to McDonald, and we wanted to just get back out here and really prove that we were a better team than what we showed last week. I’m really proud of the girls.”

Mineral Ridge falls to 16-3 with the loss and 12-2 in the MVAC Scarlet Tier.

Sullivan Sandy led the way for the Rams with 13 points. Kelcee Dye added 10.

Mineral Ridge coach Matt Cluse saw a lot of uncharacteristic mistakes from his team. With the tournament looming, the Rams need to make adjustments, starting with the defense.

“We’ve had momentum, and we kind of lost that momentum here the last couple of days,” Cluse said. “We weren’t allowed in the gym the whole week, so we’ve had no practice since Saturday. We came in here today and laid an egg. Hats off to Jackson-Milton. They were the hungrier team today. They came in wanting to knock us off the pedestal, and they did. We played bad basketball. That’s about as bad as you’re going to see this team play. Foul trouble, turnovers, just things that we usually don’t do. … We learn from this and move on, and we try to figure out what we did right and what we did wrong. There weren’t a lot of rights today.”

Mineral Ridge travels to Beaver Township on Saturday to face South Range at 3 p.m.

The Blue Jays have some time off before their next contest, facing Chalker on Saturday, Feb. 7.