Nothing in baseball can match an ace pitcher, not even the weight of history.
GARRETT – The gesture of the night, Leo girls basketball coach Carrie Shappell revealed when it was done, was the raised eyebrow.
Seems she got a lot of them at halftime Friday night, with her team trailing by eight and the game plan having gone the way, apparently, of all best-laid plans.
“Yeah, our game plan was to stop their penetration,” Shappell said after Leo rallied to shut down Angola in the second half and advance to the championship game of the Garrett Sectional with a 45-42 win in the first semifinal game.
“So my girls were looking at me like I was losing my mind when (Angola) hit six threes in the first half.”
Crazy is as crazy does, though. And so the Lions stuck to the game plan, and back Leo roared to win it in the fourth quarter.
It set up a championship showdown today against Concordia, which knocked out Woodlan 52-34 in the second game Friday.
The Cadets led wire-to-wire after jumping out to a 12-3 lead, and cut themselves loose for good with an 8-0 run to end the first half that sent them to the locker room with a 26-15 lead. After that, it was whole lot of Courtney Smith, who scored 12 of her game-high 21 points in the third quarter.
Annalissa Kammeyer and Lauren Marinko added 10 apiece for Concordia. Lauren Ehle led Woodlan with 12.
In game one, Angola dropped four threes in the first quarter to jet out to a 16-4 lead after one, led 24-16 at the half and still led 40-32 with 5:36 to play.
“I honestly didn’t think they were going to miss,” said Leo forward Keanna Gary, who led Leo with 16 points.
But after Megan Davis’ post layup with 5:55 to play, the Hornets didn’t make another field goal and scored just two points in the last 5 1/2 minutes. And Erika Rinehart, who burned the Lions for 17 points and five of her team’s nine threes through three quarters, went 0 for 4 and scoreless in the fourth.
Into the vacuum stepped Gary and Katie Pannabecker for Leo.
Gary, who scored nine of her 16 in the fourth, ignited an 11-0 run for the Lions with a layup and free throw at the 5:21 mark, and Pannabecker contributed a layup and runner off glass to give Leo its first lead of the game, 41-40, with 3:54 to play. Angola never got even again.
“What I told my girls at halftime is, ‘You’re down eight and they hit six threes. You need to believe in us,’ ” Shappell said. “And they bought it. They bought it 110 percent.”
And patiently, relentlessly, reeled in Angola.
“We just chipped away,” Shappell said. “That was the hardest type of game to win, because we didn’t go on too many runs. It was sporadic, but they came at the right time.
“They did their job tonight in the second half. I’m very proud of them.”
