The biggest testament to how good PikeView’s Hannah Perdue was this past season is how teams approached her, making her the focus of their defensive game plan.
“I have seen her play before and we had somebody in her face almost the entire game,” Spring Valley head coach Larry Bo Miller said on Jan. 5 “We knew she was a good player. I told the girls if she goes to get a popcorn, that we better pay for it.”
Summers County head coach Chad Meador concurred.
After she scored 42 points against the Lady Bobcats last year, Meador made sure she had somebody in her face wherever she went.
“With PikeView it was always Perdue,” Meador said. “She has the ability to take over a game.”
After averaging 26.4 points per game last season, the attention she drew was well deserved. But despite that she managed to still average 20 points a game this season, helping lead PikeView to the Class AAA State semifinals.
For her efforts, Perdue has been named the inaugural Lootpress Girls Basketball Offensive Player of the Year by the Lootpress sportswriters.
With teams fully aware of Perdue’s talents, she had to expand her game to become more than just a lethal scorer. Facing doubles teams, and at times triple teams, she made an effort to help prepare her younger teammates all season and it paid off with one of them hitting the game-tying shot in the state quarterfinals.
It was a point of emphasis for the Concord signee.
“Honestly I had to find my teammates a lot more,” Perdue said. “All of us contributed this year so I didn’t have to do it all on my own. I didn’t have to do it all on my own last year but I felt like being a leader and stepping into a position where I could carry all the weight on my shoulders and put a lot of points on the board – that’s what I did last year. This year I had a lot more help.”
While scoring was nice, and Perdue did a lot of it finishing with 1,308 career points, getting those younger teammates involved was what grew her offensive game and pushed the program to new heights. During her sophomore season when the Panthers won their quarterfinal game before Covid put an end to the state tournament, the Panthers found success feeding the ball to post players Shiloh Bailey and Laken McKinney.
This year’s team fielded a plethora of young post players in Brooke Craft, Hannah Harden and a freshman forward in Riley Meadows.
Perdue knew she could rely on longtime friend and fellow senior Anyah Brown to help but also knew a deep run in the postseason would require the entire team to develop. Sometimes she absorbed even more of that responsibility with head coach Tracy Raban forced to miss two games with an illness.
“I had to feed them the ball a lot more and I think that helped,” Perdue said. “In practice we would all work on shooting drills. It wasn’t just a look for me anymore. I realized that those girls were just as important as I am on the floor so getting them involved helped us a lot more.
“I have the mindset of if I get frustrated, then everyone else is going to get frustrated as well, so I just kind of kept my composure throughout being double-teamed and teams playing hard defenses on me. Obviously if there’s two kids on me then somebody’s open on the floor. So I think that looking at it from a point guard point of view, if I’m getting double-teamed then somebody is open and we’re more likely to score a basket.”
Perdue will be honored at the Spring Lootpress Awards Banquet – along with the other winter and spring sports award winners – on Saturday, May 28 at the Beckley-Raleigh County Convention Center. She will also receive a $500 scholarship from the Lootpress Foundation.
Email: tylerjackson@lootpress.com and follow on Twitter @tjack94
