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Girls Basketball: Bartlett holds on for victory vs West Chicago
| Andrew A. Nelles~For Sun-Times Media |
Updated: February 20, 2012 9:34PM
West Chicago could slow the tempo Monday, but could not delay the inevitable.
The Wildcats’ deliberate style in the first half kept the score low, and Bartlett pulled out to a sizeable advantage before hanging on against a wild, late West Chicago rally for a 52-46 victory in the Hoffman Estates Class 4A Sectional semifinals.
“It doesn’t mess with our brains,” Bartlett post player Lisa Palmer said of the narrow victory. “I just feel like we need to be better prepared and finish games.”
With the win, Bartlett plays in Thursday’s 7:30 p.m. sectional title game against Wheaton Warrenville South.
“We’re right where we want to be, still playing at tournament time for a sectional title,” Bartlett coach Denise Sarna said.
West Chicago (16-13), which trailed 40-10 at halftime of a regular-season blowout loss to Bartlett (29-1), maintained its discipline on offense despite a Bartlett man-to-man defense that forced 14 turnovers by halftime.
The Wildcats kept looking for a layup and reset the offense if it wasn’t there. The approach worked to limit Bartlett to only 15 first-half field goal attempts. Bartlett led 22-4 with 16 seconds left in the first half, but then a strange five-point play — a three-pointer by Claire Monroe and a layup by Courtney Toman following a foul call on Bartlett after the three-point shot — let the Wildcats creep a bit closer at halftime.
“I think they just tried to slow the game down because they thought if they could slow their offense down, they could slow our offense down too,” said Bartlett’s Haley Videckis. “But we’re a pretty fast team.
“It was frustrating definitely because it wasn’t the team we prepared for — but we capitalized off our steals and used our size advantage,” Videckis said. For more than three quarters it looked that way. Videckis scored a game-high 23 points, Kristin Conniff 12, and Palmer 10 points, and Bartlett shot 44 percent for the game (16-of-36).
Bartlett held West Chicago to 29 percent shooting through three quarters for a 38-23 lead. The edge got to as many as 17 with 2-1/2 minutes left in the game. Then West Chicago’s deliberate style gave way to run-and-gun, foul, and three-point shooting. It worked to get the Wildcats within striking distance, and then as close as four at 50-46 with 12.9 seconds left.
But Videckis made 7-of-8 fourth-quarter free throws to offset a 3-for-10 effort by her teammates at the line in the fourth quarter.
“After the first half we kind of quit playing on the defensive side,” Sarna said. “They obviously tried to slow the game down the first half so hence, low scoring, but we had a dumb play at the end of the first half and any time you give a team a boost it can act in their favor. In the second half they obviously didn’t try to slow it down.”
Laura Panicali had 10 of her 15 points in the fourth quarter and Monroe hit eight of her 13 then as the Wildcats had four fourth-quarter three-pointers. “I think it was a mental breakdown in how we were supposed to defend,” Videckis said.
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