Plenty of positives for Grayslake Central
Maddy Miller and Skyler Jessop sat at a table during the postgame news conference, heads down, their eyes darting up, down and across the official game stats of their Grayslake Central basketball team's 64-41 loss to Montini in Monday night's Class 3A Hoffman Estates supersectional.
Each player kept scanning and studying the sheet in front of them, as if intently trying to solve a Sudoku puzzle.
Alas for Miller and Jessop, anyway they looked at them, the numbers weren't good.
Rams coach Steve Ikenn, flanked by his starting backcourt, found a number that piqued his interest.
Twelve.
That's how many turnovers Grayslake Central committed against Montini's lightning-quick Broncos, led by 5-foot-4, Notre Dame-bound dynamo Whitney Holloway.
“We actually didn't turn the ball over too much,” Ikenn said.
Leave it to the upbeat first-year coach to find perspective and a positive on a night when, for the first time all season, his team was overmatched.
“We handled their pressure just fine,” Ikenn, whose girls lost for just the fourth time, said of the once-beaten Broncos, who will seek their second straight state championship this weekend.
Where the Rams struggled, Ikenn added, was allowing Montini to snag 11 offensive rebounds and not moving the ball as well as they normally do.
Hey, what's a team to do when its best and tallest player, 6-1 Rebekah Llorens, who has seen few players her height all season, sees a pair of 6-4 sophomores (Malayna Johnson and Diamond Thompson) coming off the bench to defend her, while the Broncos' starting pivot (Tianna Brown) is so strong that she swatted the opening tip out of bounds, past the baseline?
“You're going up and it's like, ‘OK, how am I getting the ball over her?' ” Ikenn said.
Ikenn, without looking down at the stat sheet, found another positive number.
“We scored 41 points,” he said. “Which is a lot more than (the average) they've given up (per game). They've been giving up under 30. Our problem was, we gave up 64.”
Two more not-so-good stats for the Rams: They shot 23 percent, compared to Montini's 51 percent.
Montini's length and muscle inside had the Rams shooting 3-pointers often, and often missing them (2 of 17).
“We just didn't play our game,” said Jessop, who scored a game-high 16 points and canned the Rams' only 3s. “We didn't drive as much as we normally do.”
To prep for Montini, Miller said the Rams even practiced against a “6-7” social studies teacher at Grayslake Central.
Six feet seven, really, Maddy?
“He's not that tall,” Ikenn said, grinning at Miller. “She's just making up numbers.”
The Rams won 28 games.
That's real. That's what Miller, Jessop and their teammates can focus on.