Without anyone in her face, Jadyn Long definitely is going to fire away.

The Plano senior led a third quarter offensive explosion to make a tight first half yesterday’s news during a 67-37 win over Sandwich on Tuesday in the KRC opener for both squads.

Long scored 14 to lead three Reapers in double figures. She also had a team-high nine rebounds. Chloe Rowe had 12 points and fellow junior Cami Nunez matched Long with three treys and finished with 11 points. Freshmen Le’Niya Viser and Cora Hardecopf added nine and eight points respectively. Jailyn Brown had eight rebounds. Viser had five steals.

“Hand down, man down,” Long said. “I think we were just trying to keep our heads up. We wanted to beat Sandwich, so we just kind of locked in during halftime and all of us told each other to just have good energy and stay confident.”

Plano (3-2, 1-0) knocked down seven three-pointers alone in the third quarter, scoring 30 points in the quarter after holding a 24-19 halftime lead.

“We just came out with no energy in the first half,” Plano coach Tristan Spivey said. “We’re a high energy team so we’ve got to get playing like that to get wheels turning. When we’re hitting shots it goes pretty well for us.”

Long’s third three midway through the third quarter gave the Reapers a 41-26 lead as they began to pull away.

“We got a lot of contributions and I felt like the team rallied after Cora (Hardecopf) hit some shots,” Spivey said. “She can hit shots but hasn’t scored like that before and hit a couple threes and got the rest of the team going.”

Her first, from a few feet beyond the arc, made it 50-32 with just under two minutes left in the third. She’d strike again with 45 seconds left to make it 53-32.

Plano drained nine treys.

“When we’re making shots like that it’s going to be hard to defend us,” Spivey said. “But that first half, I don’t know what it was about, but they responded. I’m really proud of them for how they responded. And Sandwich always plays us tough. Every single time I’ve coached against them it’s been tough. And I told the girls that was going to happen. We kind of got on them at halftime and they did everything that I asked. I couldn’t be prouder.”

Sandwich sophomore Kyra Johnson split a pair of free throws, rebounding the miss on the second and scoring off it to pull Sandwich to within 22-19 in the final minute of the first half. 

“I thought we played great in the first half and if we hit a few layups and make a couple free throws, we have the lead going into halftime,” Sandwich coach Ray Napientek said. “We played well defensively, put some pressure on them, made them make some mistakes, but that second half we completely disappeared.”

Sandwich (1-5, 0-1) didn’t know what hit them after matching Plano for the first two quarters. 

“You just tip your cap to them, they hit seven threes in that quarter, so you tip your cap,” Napientek said. “We’ve got to do a better job. We kind of told the team at half let’s go win that basketball game and Plano came out and played a great first five, six, seven minutes and just put us away.”

Kayden Corneil’s 14 points were tops for Sandwich. Fellow senior Bailey Frieders had six points.

“The girls are working hard,” Napientek said. “Four girls that played in the junior varsity game were in this game. We don’t just have the numbers so I’m proud of the girls for stepping up.”