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By KEVIN ECKLEBERRY

Daily News

The Troup Lady Tigers returned to the basketball court after a week off, and they didn’t show any signs of rust.

The Lady Tigers surged to a 28-4 halftime lead in Thursday’s road showdown against the LaGrange Lady Grangers, and they secured a 38-23 victory to even their record at 2-2.

Because of quarantine procedures the Lady Tigers hadn’t practiced in a week, but that didn’t seem to have any impact.

“Honestly, I expected us to be somewhat sloppy, because you haven’t had those days to practice, and you get winded,” Troup head coach Carla Thornton. “A week, that’s a lot in basketball time.”

Troup, spurred by a lock-down defense, had a 14-2 lead after the first quarter, and it duplicated that score in the second quarter to build a 28-4 halftime lead.

“We wanted to go ahead and set the tempo early, and once we set the tempo, we had the game in hand, and things were in our favor, so we decided to pull off a little bit and work on some things, fine-tune some things because we hadn’t been able to practice for the past week,” Thornton said.

For LaGrange, it was all about pride in the second half.

“The main thing I told them in the locker room, this is your house, you don’t want to get embarrassed here,” LaGrange head coach Stephen Tuck said. “It was 28-4, and that’s embarrassing. “

LaGrange outscored Troup 12-4 in the third quarter, and that was a positive sign for Tuck.

“You come out like it’s 0-0 and win this quarter, which we did,” Tuck said. “We played hard. Once we got into the third quarter, we realized we could complete.”

It was the first of three regular-season meetings between the cross-town rivals.

The next two meetings between LaGrange and Troup will be Region 2-AAAA games.

“This is the non-region game, so let’s see what we can and can’t do,” Tuck said. “I just think we were able to find out some things. We saw some girls that have that fight. That’s all you want to see.”

Aniya Palmer, Monyia Murphy and Alexcia Murphy each scored 10 points for Troup, and Samarria Weldon added six points.

For LaGrange, Brandasia Cofield led the way with five points, and Jayla Lancaster and Holly Lynn added four points apiece.