Staff photo / Brad Emerine West Branch’s Jillian Pidgeon drives against Garfield’s Grace Mills.

GARRETTSVILLE — The road Warriors took care of business early in a non-league high school girls basketball game Monday.

West Branch scored the first nine points of the game against host Garfield, built a 33-15 halftime margin and scored the first 12 points after intermission en route to a 69-26 victory.

The Warriors improved to 9-2 overall and have won six of their seven road contests this season.

“We’ve had 11 games so far and seven have been on the road,” West Branch coach Walt DeShields said. “We’ve only lost one game on the road, and that was a neutral floor against Akron Hoban in overtime. So to be a road team early and have success is a plus for us because we’ll have a lot of home games in late January and into February.”

West Branch may not have some of the height its had in past seasons, but the Warriors have balance and depth and are a tremendous defensive team.

“Defense is the cornerstone of our program — it’s defense first,” DeShields said. “We pride ourselves in shutting people down because it always gives you a chance to win. We did a really good job with that tonight.

“(Garfield) came in averaging around 65 points a game and they’ve got some talented younger girls who can score and hurt you. I think for the most part, we frustrated them. We did a super job of help and on-ball defense, we contested shots and limited them to one shot for the most part.”

That didn’t go unnoticed by Garfield coach Aaron Gilbert, whose squad fell to 6-3.

“We haven’t scored 30 points on them in the last three years. I don’t know what the deal is, but we weren’t very good tonight. I don’t know where our heads were tonight. I’m not watching this tape. There’s nothing that we can learn from this.

“We’re very young. We start two sophomores and the first two off the bench are a freshman and sophomore. We’re still trying to learn the game. We’re just not very good right now.”

Peyton Alazaus led West Branch with 16 points on the strength of four 3-pointers. Hannah Ridgway added 14 points.

“We moved the ball well, shared it well and we had a lot of girls score,” DeShields said. “We had 12 of our 13 players score tonight. Our bench had success and played a lot of minutes, which is what we strive to get. Our depth is one of our strengths this year.

“Not as big as a few years ago, but we go 6-foot, 5-10, 5-10, 5-10 and our guards have long arms, so that is a plus defensively. Carly Scarpitti is so quick and we just use the length and speed to get into passing lanes well.

Gilbert also was impressed by the Warriors.

‘Their length hurt us from the get-go,” Gilbert said. “They bothered our young girls way too much for us to have any effectiveness offensively.

“They’re also deep; they sub 5-for-5. They don’t have that dominant big girl or two inside that they’ve had in the past couple of years but they can all shoot it and they present a lot of mismatches. They have a lot of movement. Their girls constantly move. They’re going to go deep in the tournament. I think this is one of the better teams they’ve had.”

Grace Mills scored nine points to lead the G-Men.