The regular season is winding down for high school basketball and the Northwestern Lehigh girls team had a bit of a reprieve this past week with just one game on the schedule.

That game was against rival Northern Lehigh and the Lady Tigers hit the road and collected a 79-53 win over the Bulldogs for their 18th straight win this season.

The Tigers put up 48 first-half points to take a 48-26 lead at halftime, which would be as close as Northern Lehigh would get in the game. The senior and freshman combo of Cara Thomas and Natalie Conner continued to work well for Northwestern with Thomas scoring 26 points and Conner throwing down 22 points in the win.

Emma Freeman scored nine points and had a standout game against Northern Lehigh, doing a lot of things that don’t show up on the stats, but help the team to continue winning.

Freeman has been known for her three-point shooting with Northwestern, but against the zone defense from the Lady Bulldogs, she took a different approach. She has also adapted her game defensively after watching Thomas and fellow senior Brook Balliet.

“Having Natalie (Conner) helps to spread the floor out a little bit for everyone else,” said Freeman. “And I knew they were going to play zone, so I used that to my advantage and just pulled up for some jumpers for two points and I usually don’t do that.

“Defensively, playing back in the press, I’ve gotten better at reading passes and have worked on that in practice. I’ve also watched Cara (Thomas) and Brook (Balliet) because they’ve been playing up there for a while and seeing them read passes so well, I learned from that.”

Through last week Thomas scored 1,356 points for her career and is the top scorer all-time in girls basketball at Northwestern. She headed into this week 95 points away from taking the all-time scoring record for boys and girls basketball at Northwestern.

Thomas is guaranteed to have at least five more games in her high school basketball career and likely more should Northwestern make a deep run in the postseason. The senior is averaging 19.1 points per game this season and 14.1 for her career.

For the final week of the season, the Lady Tigers (15-0 Colonial, 18-1 overall) are back at work with three league games, two against division rivals. First up is a road game at Moravian Academy (2-13, 2-14) before their home finale against Jim Thorpe (3-11, 3-15) followed by a trip to Palmerton (13-3, 16-4) to face the Blue Bombers.

A win over either Jim Thorpe or Palmerton gives Northwestern the West Division championship and while they have clinched a league playoff spot, two wins would lock them into being the top seed in the Colonial League playoffs.

A spot in the District 11 playoffs is locked up for Northwestern and they are likely to be the top seed in the classification there as well.