THOMASVILLE – Thomas County Central’s girls basketball team had a successful start to its season during the Thanksgiving Holidays.

Playing in the Charles Cooper Thanksgiving Invitational at Lowndes County High, the Lady Yellow Jackets toppled Woodville-Tompkins 52-34 on Nov. 20 and followed with a 61-41 victory over Mary Persons on Nov. 21.

“We wind up playing Mary Persons the second day and that was the game I was really scared of. I wasn’t sure how they were going to bounce back to back, first two games of the season. The girls played really good that night,” Central coach Stacy Masten said. “Our top three players were Marcy Pearson, Tia Floyd and Vesha Giddens. All three of those played pretty good on both nights.”

Pearson led Central with 16 in the first game, while Giddens added 15 points and 14 rebounds, and Floyd scored 11 points and eight rebounds. Giddens followed with 24 points and 15 rebounds against Mary Persons, while Person chipped in 18 points and Floyd added 11 points and 10 rebounds.

The two tournament wins were important for a Central squad that didn’t benefit from a preseason scrimmage this year.

“Trying to see how they’re going to mesh together. That’s a big part of it, the chemistry part of it, especially when we didn’t have a scrimmage game. We weren’t able to get a scrimmage game, so it was really interesting to see how they were going to do,” Masten said. “We needed to play a couple of games before we played our first regular season game (Tuesday) night against Bainbridge.”