Staff photo / Brian Yauger Badger senior Katie Grexa dribbles up the court in the team’s 59-31 victory over Pymatuning Valley. Grexa scored 25 in the win.

ANDOVER — The Badger Braves hang their hat on their team defense. It’s intense, and most importantly, it wins them games.

Holding Pymatuning Valley 20 points below its season average, the Braves controlled pace on both ends of the floor and powered through the Lakers for a 59-31 victory.

The win gives Badger a share of the Northeast Athletic Conference crown as the Stars Division champions, and a chance to outright hold the title for the second year in a row.

After a league championship drought that was approaching the 40-year mark, being on the cusp of a back-to-back has the Braves excited.

“We definitely are at our best when we’re defending the basketball at a high level,” first-year Badger coach Patrick Carney said. “I felt like for 32 minutes, we brought energy the whole way through. I don’t think there were any let downs. I think the effort was there. We challenged them before the game and the girls took the challenge. We told them that we needed to have a fast start, and we knew that this obviously was a game for Pymatuning Valley, where if they won, they’d share the league title with us and we didn’t want to let that happen.

“On their home floor, especially, it was imperative to get out to a quick start and really set the tone defensively and dictate the tempo of the game, and we did that. Our girls stood up to the challenge.”

Toward the end of the first half, the Lakers started to find some momentum, and briefly closed the gap on the scoreboard. In the final minute of the first half though, Badger responded with a run of its own, going into the locker room up 32-13.

“I thought that all night, we really didn’t give Pymatuning Valley a ton of overly easy looks. I thought we challenged shots for the most part,” Carney said. “I thought we sped the ball up. Basketball is a game of runs, but we feel like with our kids and our talent, that over the course of the night, if we can just speed the game up a little bit for 32 minutes, over the course of the night, we are going to like where we end up.”

Katie Grexa led the way for the Braves with a 25-point outing, and Gabriella Miller added 14.

The Lakers were paced by Jolene Sharpe with eight.

The loss drops Pymatuning Valley to 9-6 on the season with two of those losses coming against the Braves. The only blemishes on the Lakers’ league record are at the hands of Badger as well.

With a sophomore and junior-laden group, Pymatuning Valley is still in the search for its on-court leader.

The first step to making that happen is confidence.

“I think right now we just need to have confidence in ourselves. I think that’s our biggest thing,” Lakers coach Geena Gabriel said. “It’s like we’re still in our freshman and sophomore era versus being in our junior and senior era. Like ‘This is my last couple years, I want to go out with a bang’. We’re slowly getting there, but we’re not there yet. We’re trying to work the younger girls into the system.”

Pymatuning Valley looks to rebound against Windham.

Badger (16-2, 12-0) is in the home-stretch of the season. With just four games remaining, all of which are at home against bigger schools, the Braves aim to go into the postseason truly battle-tested.

The next two, Hubbard, and a rematch with Kennedy, are the biggest.

“That’s going to be a huge test for us. We know JFK is one of the best teams in the area. We’re looking forward to the challenge,” Carney said. “We played them tough over there in game one and I feel like we’ve gotten better as a basketball team, and I’m sure they have as well. It’s going to be a heck of a challenge for us and a great game before the tournament to get tuned up against two of the best Division IV teams in the area. We’re looking forward to it.”

byauger@tribtoday.com