Montini sweeps through tournament with ease
Montini invited seven of the best girls basketball teams in the Chicago area to its inaugural Christmas tournament, then the Broncos crushed five of them by an average of 22 points a game.
Happy holidays, indeed.
The final victim was Thornton Fractional North, which tried to shorten Wednesday's championship game by going into a semi-stall against the Broncos' 2-3 zone. The plan backfired when Montini pulled out to a double-digit lead anyway and held on for a 60-45 victory.
"We just double-digited three really, really good teams here," Montini coach Jason Nichols said of Bogan, Marian Catholic and TF North (14-3). "And we double-digited Peoria Richwoods beforehand. So I'm really happy. I'm a jerk, I'll find something along the way to motivate (the Broncos) that they're doing wrong. And I told them that. But for tonight I'm happy. I'll be mad at them at practice Monday about something."
The Meteors' slow-down strategy - designed to keep the score within 5-6 points into the final quarter - took Montini (16-1) by surprise, but it was a pleasant surprise.
"I wasn't too worried about it because as long as we played good defense and held them, then we knew the game would go by faster," said Montini center Michala Johnson, the tournament MVP and one of eight players on the floor destined for Division I universities next year or the year after.
"We're able to match up against them, but still, they have such creative athletes that are able to break you down, I didn't understand it," said Nichols, who hopes to expand the tourney next year to 16 teams. "It surprised me a little bit, but in a positive way. I was actually surprised we weren't scoring. We could've had a bigger lead there."
Montini led 5-2 after one quarter, but the Broncos got 3-pointers early in the second from Mallory Sosnovich and Whitney Holloway to open things up. They led 20-9 at halftime.
"We had to go ahead and change," TF North coach Tim Zasada said. "We thought the tempo was fine in the beginning, but we just didn't execute like we should've on the defensive backboards."
The lead topped out at 16 points early in the third quarter after another Sosnovich 3-pointer, but the visitors from Calumet City cut the margin to 6 just five minutes later. Johnson answered with a basket, followed by another Sosnovich 3, and the Broncos had held off that attack. TF North never got closer than 9 points again.
The Meteors knew that Johnson would get her points, and she did, 22 of them. They knew to be wary of Holloway, and the junior guard dashed their hopes with 17 points. But the Meteors didn't expect Sosnovich to do them in.
"We tried taking away their 3s and we did in the first quarter," Zasada said. "But when you have to go full go at them, that's the kind of thing that's going to happen.
"You pick your poison and you try to make their - I don't want to say worst player, because she's pretty good too - but their worst player try to beat us, and she did."
"Mallory Sosnovich hit some monster 3s in that third quarter when they were making runs to get it to 8, she would always get it up to 11," Nichols added. "She did a great job."