Montini sweats out win over Batavia
Batavia played Montini about as well as anyone has this season. It just wasn't well enough to win Monday night.
The top-seeded Broncos advanced to the semifinals of their Montini Christmas Tournament again by sweating out a 57-52 victory against the Bulldogs in Lombard. The Bulldogs (13-3) are only the second team this season to finish a game within 27 points of Montini (14-0).
"I like having close games against better teams rather than just blowing everyone out because it helps the whole team get better," Montini junior guard Nikki Oppenheimer said. "You have to be composed and you have to be able to step up and not let the other team beat you."
Batavia ran into some trouble starting the third quarter. The Bulldogs fell behind by 7 points while missing their first 12 shots of the period. Still they went to the fourth trailing by just 3 points.
"I bet a lot of people looking around late in the third quarter thought that Montini was going to run away with it," Batavia coach Kevin Jensen said. "I don't know if they were up 10, but it felt like 10, and I looked up and we had 1 point and six and half minutes."
Jensen said the comeback was "a big area of growth. It looked like things were going south against a really good team, and we got right back in it and had an opportunity at the end."
The teams traded the lead six times in the final period. Tied at 49, senior guard Lea Kerstein gave the Broncos the lead for good with a 3-pointer with 1:24 to play.
"Bad time to lose sight of a shooter," Jensen said.
Oppenheimer added a free throw with 25.8 seconds to play and grabbed the rebound when she missed the second, then was fouled again. She made two more free throws to put the Broncos ahead by 6. A pair of Kerstein foul shots made it an 8-point game with 13.1 seconds to play before Hailey Orman's 3-pointer ended the game.
Hannah Frazier, the Bulldogs' St. Louis University-bound forward, led Batavia with 27 points and 10 rebounds.
"We really wanted to stop Hannah," Oppenheimer said. "She was scoring a lot on us and we knew we had to stop her if we wanted to stop their team. She was hitting shots in the high post and we knew we had to get further out on her. So we tried to focus on that."
"I told the girls the positive was we got to play a tight game, but how we got to that tight game really bothers me," Montini coach Jason Nichols added, noting his team worked in practice for 30-40 minutes on stopping Frazier, particularly on stopping her from going left.
Kerstein finished with 19 points on five 3-pointers. Lindsey Jarosinski, the Broncos' 6-foot-5 sophomore, added 15 points, 9 rebounds and 8 blocked shots in the post.
"The difference in the game might have been the times we lost sight of their shooters, especially those top two shooters," Jensen said. "I thought when we contested, they didn't hit many when we contested. But they hit all of them when they were wide open."
Montini will meet Hersey at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday in the semifinals. Batavia plays Huntley at 3 p.m.
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