The Boyertown high girls basketball team was looking to get rid of the sour taste from their mouth after a loss to Spring-Ford in the second round of the District 1-AAAA playoffs. After Mother Nature had her say with snow on Saturday, the Lady Bears finally got their chance to qualify for the state tournament. Boyertown faced Chess-Mont champion Bishop Shanahan (22-4) with very high stakes. The winner moves on and the loser sees an end to their season.
Boyertown used pressure defense to stay alive in the tournament with a 47-32 victory. Sophomore Allie Marcus led all scorers with 14 points, while junior Maria Garofolo chipped in with 10 and sophomore Abby Kapp had eight for the Lady Bears.
With the win, Boyertown is one win away from qualifying for the state playoffs, which was their goal from the beginning of the season.
“It doesn’t matter where you get in, you want to play and continue the season and make a run in the state playoffs,” said Boyertown head coach Jason Bieber.
“We let them hang around and they’re a nice team,” said Bieber. “They are well coached. Number five (Ciara Forde) is a real nice player. They did a real nice job not dropping their head when we jumped on them.
Boyertown’s pressure defense forced Shanahan to turn the ball over, allowing Boyertown to open up an 11-0 lead The first points was a lay up by sophomore Allie Marcus. Sophomore Abby Kapp scored a lay up on an assist by senior Jordan Webb forcing the Bishop Shanahan coach to call a full time out.
“I saw some game film on them and I thought and their guards struggled sometimes handling pressure,” said Bieber. “They’re not use to our kind of speed in the league that they play in. I thought that we could get after them a little bit and it definitely worked early in the game.”
After 5:03 went by in the opening quarter, Shanahan finally scored its first field goal by freshman Devon Adams in the paint. The Lady Bears led after one quarter 13-5. Marcus lead all scorers in the quarter with six points while Kapp chipped in with four and Junior Ali Bauman had three.
The pressure continued to bother Shanahan in the secod quarter. By halftime. But Shanahan used pressure defense of its own which caused Boyertown to turn the ball over. Junior Kelly Cox hit a three point shot at the buzzer to cut the lead to 25-17 going into intermission.
“They got that three pointer at the end of the first half and I knew that they would be fired up for the first two or three minutes in the second half,” said Bieber. “We had to withstand that and open it back up again as we did and they kind of fought back again.”
Marcus hit a three-point shot for the first field goal of the quarter at the 6:23 mark. Shanahan got balanced scoring and tried to get back into the game but oulc not put a dent in the lead. Jamie Powers picked up her third foul with 2:11 left in the quarter. Garofolo picked up her third foul late in the quarter. After three quarters, Boyertown led, 35-27 with one quarter to play.
Bieber knew that one of the keys was to stop Shanahan’s big girl, freshman Devon Adams.
“The one thing we didn’t want to do was to get into a half court game. We thought that she would be able to hurt us a lot in a half court set,” said Bieber. “That’s why we pressed a lot. When we played Spring-Ford on Wednesday, we were out rebounded by 10 or 11 rebounds, and there’s no way that should happen to a team with our size. We focused on one shot and done and that would lead to our fast break and transition points.”
Boyertown started to pull away in the quarter out scoring the Lady Eagles 12-4 in the quarter. The one big concern that Bieber has was going 16-for-32 from the foul line. He knows that if they do that on Wednesday, he feels that the team could be in big trouble. Every player from Boyertown who went to the foul line shot 50% for the game.
Phil Haddad is a free lance writer for the Times. You can follow him on Twitter @writersprtsBT
