Parkersburg South’s Hannah Wingrove drives to the basketball in between a pair of Hurricane defenders during the Patriots’ 66-20 win over the Redskins Monday evening inside the Rod Oldham Athletic Center. Wingrove scored a team-high 15 points in South’s first win of the season. (Photo by Joe Albright)

PARKERSBURG — Hannah Wingrove’s goal was to “not foul out and not foul a bunch” Monday against Hurricane inside the Rod Oldham Athletic Center.

Two days after fouling out and sitting on the bench late in fourth quarter during a loss to rival Parkersburg High School, she again left the floor early … but not because of infraction trouble.

Rather, her 15 points plus 12 more from Skylar Bosley and a stout defensive effort against the Redskins allowed the junior and the other starters to rest the entire fourth quarter as the Patriots picked up win No. 1, 66-20.

South had just held their visitors to no points in the third period, and it was time to think toward Wednesday’s 7:30 p.m. rematch with University.

Wingrove spoke on how the mark in the win column affects everything going forward.

“It feels awesome, it would have been hard with Hurricane struggling if we came in and laid an egg, and now that we have win No. 1 out of the way it gives us more confidence to win our next games we have coming up,” she said.

The Hawks may be one of the teams on the schedule, but round two against the Big Reds is on Saturday.

But of course, they first had to get through the Redskins, whose lone win came against Poca.

And Shawn Lucas’ squad looked prime to make sure South had to work for their W … at least through the opening minutes. The ‘Skins jumped out to an early 6-2 lead on a bucket from Natalie Dempsey and two more from Maggie Oduour. Brooke Sandy and Hannah Wingrove though hit one three each over the next 30 seconds and the Patriots never trailed again. The closest the Skins got the rest of the way came immediately after Wingrove’s trey which built the lead to 8-6 with 2:28 left in the opening quarter.

“We got ahead and everyone started hitting shots and we played well,” Rick Dobson said.

And that was something that continued over into the second period. Bosley and Wingrove did their thing by scoring 12 of the Patriots 24 points in the period. Senior Riley Harner and Taylor Graham joined them with triples of their own. Harner’s trey set the lead at 23, while Graham’s established the 40-14 halftime score.

Buckets from Madelyn Young, who shared the leading scoring role for Hurricane along with Lauren Dye, and Sadie Works were the only points in the period for the Redskins.

Things then got even worse for the visitors in the third period.

“We decided to change our defense up with the man and just tried to get up in their face. Keeping them to scoring was our goal. We wanted to hold them to two points in four minutes and we did what we had to do. They were certainly on it,” Dobson said.

The last of thing Wingrove did before she headed for the bench was snag an offensive rebound. Overall, her head coach was elated with how the ball game went for his second-year player.

“She’s really worked hard and we have really worked on her mental status. She struggles when something bad happens and it stays with her and she can’t get rid of it. I have tried to work with her on letting it go. She works hard and she expects the ball to go in,” he said.

Young’s layup with 6:09 left in the game finally broke the Redskins scoring drought. It shrank the margin to 50-16. But, the best the ‘Skins could do to end the game was make sure the final margin of victory didn’t hit 50 points.

The effort left Dobson impressed with his team and excited for the future.

“I think three and a half quarters from great basketball (against the Big Reds) rolled over into tonight and I think we are just going to build from that,” he said.