Wauconda flipping with joy after winning NSC Prairie
Moments before Wauconda's girls basketball team finished off a 45-32 win over Grant on Saturday in a game it needed to win in order to clinch a berth in the North Suburban Conference championship game, Roslyn Summerville sneaked a peek at the scoreboard.
She started to cry.
"There was like 10 seconds left, and I was like, 'Oh my God,' " Wauconda's junior center said.
The crying shame is this: If Summerville and her teammates would have lost, a coin flip would have determined whether Wauconda or Vernon Hills would represent the Prairie Division in the NSC title game Wednesday against North Division-champ Libertyville.
"That would have been horrible," Summerville said.
That was the reality, however, as no fewer than four tiebreakers still would not have given either team the edge.
Fortunately for Wauconda, it proved to be much ado about nothing. With its win over Grant (12-15, 6-6), Wauconda (19-5, 11-1) finished a game ahead of Vernon Hills to capture its first NSC Prairie title since the conference split into two divisions in 2000.
Wauconda coach Jaime Dennis chose not to tell her team about the possible coin-flip scenario.
"We needed to take care of business today," Dennis said after she and her happy team cut down a net in their gym. "If things didn't go our way, then I would have told them. But we weren't worried about it. We had a job to do today, and that was to win. That's all I wanted them thinking about."
Wauconda's players assumed that the first tiebreaker with Vernon Hills after head-to-head competition was point differential in the teams' two games against each other. The Bulldogs beat Vernon Hills by 17 points, while Vernon Hills defeated them by 7 points.
"We thought we had it already," said senior guard Kate Martino, who had 5 steals and 9 points, sharing team-high scoring honors with Summerville (6 rebounds) and Tammy Ellis (5 rebounds).
Wauconda's first-half performance suggested that the Bulldogs were either playing like they had nothing to lose, or playing tense because they had to win.
Wauconda went into the break trailing 21-20 after Grant's Morgan Liles completed a three-point play with .02 seconds left. Liles had scored on an offensive rebound and was fouled on the play.
Wauconda turned the ball over nine times in the second quarter, even though Grant wasn't pressing.
"We went into the locker room," Martino said, "and Coach (Dennis) was just like, 'You guys are playing mediocre basketball and you're only down by one. If that doesn't motivate you to say you can do this, I don't know what does.' "
"We were a little hesitant on defense," Dennis said. "(Grant) kind of dictated where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do. Which is unusual for us. Normally, our defense dictates it. We didn't play our defense in the first half. That affected us on offense, as well."
Donnie Taggart (10 points, 10 rebounds) scored on an offensive rebound early in the third quarter to extend Grant's lead to 23-20, but Wauconda reeled off the next nine points. Erinn Hellweg (8 points, 7 rebounds) both started and ended the home team's run with putbacks.
Wauconda was up 35-27 after three and then pulled away, in part by helping force 9 fourth-quarter turnovers.
"The second half we went back to our bread and butter - our good, solid defense," Dennis said. "It got us the win."
And the outright NSC Prairie championship.