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LETTS, Iowa – Shelby Blakely hit a bank shot with less than a second remaining Tuesday night to lift the Pekin girls’ basketball team past Louisa-Muscatine, 53-51, in both teams’ season opener.

The Panthers overcame a 12-point first-quarter deficit by literally taking the ball away from the Falcons in the third quarter.

“No disrespect to them, but we gave them the basketball game,” L-M coach Nate Sanderson said. “We directly threw the ball at them for at least six points. In other places, they got deflections. We called four timeouts (in the second half) and told them to throw the ball behind them.

“It was young mistakes, and they aren’t young because they are juniors or seniors, but they are being asked to take a bigger role with more responsibility and they are adjusting to that.

“They lost confidence, they lost the basketball and then they lost the game.”

L-M committed 28 turnovers – 10 in the third quarter. It allowed Pekin to outscore L-M 20-11 in the quarter to take a 41-39 lead.

“We tried with our team to press the whole game,” Pekin coach Davis Eidahl said. “But they (L-M) were so good and we couldn’t handle them. We went to the trap, and then the zone and we tried both. We rely on our quickness.”

Pekin led by five with just more than a minute left, but an Amanda Steahr 3-pointer brought L-M within two at 50-48 with 53 seconds left.

On the other end, Blakely was fouled and hit the front end of a 1-and-1, but missed the second. Jordyn Schaper, who had a game-high 16 rebounds, hauled in the board.

With time winding down, a wide-open Megan Guldenpfennig nailed a 3-pointer with 18 seconds left to tie the score.

“Megan, as timid a shooter as she is, she made a huge shot to tie the game,” Sanderson said. “That was a big shot to take. We have to coax her to shoot it in practice. For someone who scored only two points at the varsity level last year, that was great to see.”

Eidahl called timeout with six seconds left to set up what became the winning shot by Blakely. She grabbed the inbounds pass, drove down the center of the lane and banked it in with six-tenths of a second remaining, just giving L-M enough time to call timeout.

Guldenpfennig’s three-quarter court heave at the buzzer fell short.

“It was a good game,” Eidahl said. “This is the first time since I’ve been coaching here (six years) that we’ve scored more than 32 points (at L-M). We were fortunate tonight because this is a tough place for us to play. It was a good first win for us.”

Blakely led all scorers with 14 points.

Steahr, Schaper and Emily Gardner all finished with 12 points for the Falcons, who buried six 3-pointers and shot nearly 50 percent from the field.

“It’s disconcerting that we gave them that many turnovers,” said Sanderson, whose team is off until Monday night at West Liberty. “But I thought we did a lot of things well. I think we had our highest shooting percentage we’ve had in seven years.

“We can fix throwing the ball to the other team.”

Pekin 53

Louisa-Muscatine 51

Pekin 6 15 20 12   – 53

Louisa-Muscatine 18 10 11 12   – 51

Pekin (53) – Annie Jones 3-5 2-2 9; Shelby Blakely 4-12 5-8 14; Jessica Deutsch 5-17 2-2 13; Kaitlin Spilman 0-3 0-1 0; Jaime Sterling 2-9 0-0 5; Jessi Martin 4-8 0-1 8; Krystin Bradshaw 0-1 0-0 0; Erin Mosinski 2-2 0-0 4. Totals – 20-57 9-14 53.

Louisa-Muscatine (51) – Courtney Van DeMaat 2-4 1-2 5; Amanda Steahr 4-7 0-1 12; Sami Brewer 0-1 0-0 0; Emily Luttrull 0-2 0-0 0; Megan Guldenpfennig 4-6 0-0 10; Jordyn Schaper 5-10 2-5 12; Emily Gardner 5-13 2-2 12; Shayla Fordyce 0-0 0-0 0. Totals – 20-41 5-10 51.

3-point goals – Pekin 4-21 (Jones 1-2, Blakely 1-3, Deutsch 1-10, Sterling 1-3, Martin 0-2, Bradshaw 0-1); L-M 6-10 (Steahr 4-6, Guldenpfennig 2-4). Rebounds – Pekin 19 (Jones 5, Spilman 5); L-M 32 (Schaper 16, Steahr 7). Total fouls – Pekin 12, L-M 13. Fouled out – Pekin (Moskinski). Turnovers – Pekin 12, L-M 28.

Records – Pekin 1-0, L-M 0-1.

Next game – L-M at West Liberty, 6 p.m., Monday.