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Girls Basketball: Warren wins and then waits
| Rob Dicker~Sun-Times Media
Updated: December 22, 2011 10:50PM
This wasn’t the way it was drawn up on the chalkboard a week ago, but a tournament championship is a tournament championship is a tournament champiionship.
And by the end of the season, people will remember that Warren won its own holiday girls basketball tournament, and won’t remember that they scored all of 62 points in 64 minutes in the final two games to do it.
The Blue Devils followed Wednesday’s 33-20 win over Grayslake Central with a 29-20 win Thursday over Carmel.
That gave Warren a 4-1 tourney record, the same as Grayslake Central, which beat Niles North 34-32 in the late game Thursday.
But in head-to-head play, Warren beat Grayslake so the Devils get the trophy.
If Niles North had beaten Grayslake on Thursday, Niles would have gotten the hardware by virtue of a win over Warren earlier in the tourney.
Here’s how Warren coach John Stanczykiewicz summed up the crazy week.
“Offensively, we might have set the game back, but the bottom line is having more points than the other team,” he said.
“Right now, we’ve found a formula that’s working for us: Play good zone defense ... limit them to one shot ... and while we’re not shooting the ball as well as we’d like, we are taking good shots.”
Against Carmel, Warren (9-6 overall) was 8-for-25 from the field, while Carmel (9-6 also) was 7-of-29.
Warren had 21 turnovers and Carmel 24.
The game was tied at 20-20 on Jackier Meier’s three-pointer for Carmel with 4:32 left.
But Warren closed the game on a 9-0 run, that featured five free throws, plus baskets by Alyssa Phillips (team-high nine points) and Jessica Prince.
“I thought we played well for about 29 minutes of the game, and then the last three minutes, they went on a 9-0 run,” said Carmel coach Kelly Perz. “We have some young guards — Kathleen Felicelli and Cassidy Kloss are just sophomores and haven’t been in a lot of pressure situations.”
Felicelli had 12 points in the game and made the all-tourney team.
Warren’s all-tourney picks were Prince and Alexis Leneau.
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