Wahconah Gets Back in the Win Column Against Rival Hoosac Valley

DALTON, Mass. – Madison McCarthy scored 31 points, and the Wahconah girls basketball team bounced back from Wednesday’s loss with a 63-26 win over Hoosac Valley on Friday night.

 

Wahconah used an 18-0 first-half run to build a 20-6 lead and never looked back as it ran its record to 5-2 and put loss to Frontier in the rear view mirror.

 

“We needed that one, I think, for our psyches a little bit,” Wahconah coach Liz Kay said. “And it’s a rivalry game, and it’s chippy and it’s exciting. And, regardless of the score, it’s always going to feel that way.”

 

Wahconah-Hoosac Valley has grown into one of the county’s best matchups in recent years.

 

And while the 2025 state champions from Cheshire are experiencing a rare down year this winter, Kay was far from overlooking the Hurricanes.

 

“We play them twice every year,” she said. “There are years when we’re really good and we feel like we’re better, and there are years when they’re better than we are. And somehow we managed to split and go 1-1 either way.

 

“So nothing really surprises me at this point.”

 

The Hurricanes may have surprised the home crowd by scoring the game’s first four points and taking a 6-2 lead when Genevieve Lagess (nine points, 10 rebounds) scored with an assist from  Reagan Shea (team-high 12 points) in the opening minutes.

 

But Anna Doyle knocked down a 3-pointer for Wahconah to ignite a 16-0 run to the end of the first quarter.

 

And Doyle put back a rebound for the first points of the second quarter to give her team a 14-point advantage.

 

Wahconah’s stifling defense forced more than 40 turnovers in the game, and McCarthy caught fire from behind the 3-pointer arc, making six of Wahconah’s 11 triples and upping her season average to more than 18 points per game with more than 3 treys per night.

 

Another run, this time 12-1, closed out the first half and put the game out of reach with McCarthy’s 3-pointer to make it 43-15 heading into the locker rooms.

 

Doyle finished with 12 points, and Danielle Hagmaier had six points and nine rebounds for Wahconah in the win.

 

Hoosac Valley’s second loss in a row dropped the Hurricanes to 3-5 – not the glitzy record that fans of the program have come to expect but understandable for a team with just one senior and what coach Jon Frederick describes as a challenging mix of players.

 

“The age spread is too great,” he said. “They’ve never, literally, been on the floor together until this year. … It’s like, ‘I’ve never seen you until this year. I don’t know who you are.’

 

“It’s that dynamic that we just don’t have, which is where, historically, you’ve had that group that’s played together, two or three kids, whether it be juniors, seniors, sophomores, freshmen, whatever. We don’t have that.”

 

Frederick acknowledges that the legacy of the Hurricanes program – four state titles and nine finals from 2014-25 – does not do this year’s team any favors.

 

“It’s a big burden,” he said. “Let’s face it. It’s a heavy weight to carry. But they’ve got to step up. Today was kind of proof in the pudding of where we are.”

 

All of that said, Kay had no trouble getting her players to focus when the Hurricanes were in the building.

 

“My biggest fear was that we would almost look past [Hoosac Valley] and look toward [Monday’s meeting with Drury] in some ways,” she said. “But I’m underestimating the long-term relationships with those kids.”

 

Wahconah (5-2), which lost, 37-31, to the Blue Devils in North Adams in December, will welcome the 5-3 Blue Devils to Dalton on Monday evening.

 

Hoosac Valley travels to Frontier on Monday.