Carmel's huge comeback falls short

A couple of Glenbrook North basketball players, sitting among teammates in Mundelein's bleachers before their tipoff against Prairie Ridge, cheered for Lena Munzer as Highland Park's highlight machine performed twisting layups and slapped rebounds into her soft hands against Carmel Catholic.

In Munzer's last game against Grayslake North two nights earlier the junior scored a school-record 45 points.

What fans at Mundelein saw Saturday night was almost another once-in-a-forever occurrence.

By Carmel.

The Corsairs trimmed a 26-point third-quarter deficit to one, but fell 49-47, as Highland Park advanced to Wednesday's 7:30 p.m. championship game of the Lady Mustangs Turkey Shootout.

It was the first loss for Carmel (3-1).

"Great job to Carmel," said coach Jolie Bechtel, whose Giants improved to 3-1. "We lost our composure a little bit. They put on the pressure and we dealt with it pretty well at first, and then we panicked."

Munzer finished with 23 points, 12 rebounds and 6 steals, while teammate Arial Swartz added 16 points.

Munzer picked up her fourth foul early in the fourth with the Giants up 42-24. Bechtel left her star in the game, but Munzer didn't play as aggressively on either end of the court. She had 0 shot attempts in the fourth.

"She's a really good player," Carmel coach Kelly Perz said. "She's smart on defense."

Jackie Berardi sank a short jumper with 3:18 left in the third quarter to extend Highland Park's lead to 40-14. But Carmel's Jackie Meier (team-high 13 points) hit the first of her three 3-pointers, and little did anyone know that the shot would start an amazing comeback.

"At that point, we really didn't have anything to lose," Perz said. "I told the girls, 'Keep your head in the game, stay in it mentally, chip away as much as we can, and see if we can get it respectable.' "

By the end of the third, a 3-pointer by Cassidy Kloss (10 points, 6 rebounds) had brought Carmel within 42-22.

The Corsairs kept coming, kept hitting shots, kept pressuring Highland Park into mistakes.

Meier's fall-away 3 with 1:21 to go cut Carmel's deficit to 48-45. The senior guard then stripped Munzer and scored on a layup to make it 48-47 with 1:07 left.

With 15 seconds left, Highland Park's Morgan Bartelstein was fouled and bumped her head on the court. Dazed, she remained in the game and missed the first free throw. But she hit the second to make it a two-point game.

"I asked the official to check with her," Bechtel said. "She said she was fine."

When Carmel missed a short shot at the buzzer, Highland Park had escaped.

Carmel's "buzz" trap, which resembles a 2-3 zone, Perz said, helped force Highland Park into 7 turnovers in the fourth.

Carmel hit 9 of 12 shots including two 3-pointers by Meier and one by Kloss in the final quarter. Sarah McHugh (8 points, 6 boards) was 3 of 3 from the field.

Carmel outscored Highland Park 25-7 in the fourth.

"Our defensive intensity in the second half of the third quarter and then our ability to take care of the ball in the fourth quarter really helped us," Perz said. "We've been struggling with taking care of the ball, and that's why we were down by so much (29-10) at half."

Geneva 62, Antioch 40: Sarah Meadows' reign began auspiciously enough Saturday afternoon in Geneva.

The first-year girls basketball coach for the Vikings had Ashley Santos' torrid start to thank, not to mention a defense as menacing as an army of ants at a honey-flavored picnic.

Santos converted her opening 4 shots from the field in spearheading an 11-point unanswered run, and senior teammate Rachel Hinchman had 6 of the Vikings' 22 steals in authoring a 62-40 victory over Antioch in the teams' season opener at the Geneva Thanksgiving Tournament.

Santos, the Vikings' do-it-all Marquette-bound guard-forward scored all 18 of her game-high points in the opening half, and Hinchman added 13 points, mainly off defensive-triggered fastbreak opportunities, to pace the Geneva victory.

"It was our first game of the year, and the excitement of that (was the difference in the quick start)," Santos said. "The adrenaline (of the season opener) that's how everything got really going for us."

Santos' pair of pull-up jumpers and equal number of scores in the paint as part of an 8-point personal run less than two minutes into the quarter enabled the Vikings to spurt to an 11-0 lead.

Antioch (0-1) answered with a 5-0 burst of its own, but Santos' final of her 6 first-quarter field goals followed by a Hinchman breakaway extended the Geneva lead to 19-6 after one quarter.

The Vikings (1-0) never let Antioch within single figures the rest of the game.

The swarming, full-court Geneva defense was the Sequoits' central villain.

"We knew it coming into the game that they were going to press us (full-court)," Antioch coach Tim Borries said. "We needed to slow the game down."

But the Vikings' defensive intensity had a negative as well: several cheap fouls in the high-risk press put Antioch in the bonus two minutes before the second quarter and the double-bonus three minutes into the second quarter.

"We're going to gamble a lot more (in the future)," Meadows said. "We play so fast that at times I think the whistle came a little too quick. We do have to learn from (early foul troubles), though. We can't have three starters with two fouls in the first quarter."

For the game Geneva shot 44 percent from the floor (27-for-61), and turnover-prone Antioch (12-for-35) was at 34 percent field-goal attempts on 26 fewer attempts.

Melanie Lass' 13 points paced Antioch.

Kevin McGavin

Libertyville 39, BG 33: Alex Haley scored 14 points, including a 3-pointer, and Libertyville's girls basketball team defeated host Buffalo Grove 39-33 in the Bison Classic on Saturday.

Libertyville (2-0) also received 7 points apiece from Nicole Kruckman and Haley Hoeksel.

Buffalo Grove's Bailey North led all scorers with 17 points.

Maine South 55, Grayslake Central 21: At Buffalo Grove, Claire Brennan's 8 points led the Rams, who fell to 0-2.

Maine South got 16 points apiece from Jacqui Grant and Michelle Maher.

Round Lake splits: At Harvard, the Panthers edged Rockford East 37-33, as Morgan Evins scored 12 points.

Round Lake (2-2) then concluded the tournament with a 46-5 loss to Crystal Lake Central.

Tinley Park 61, Mundelein 52: At Mundelein, the host Mustangs led 20-9 after one quarter but got outscored 16-12 in the second, 13-12 in the third and 23-8 in the fourth.

Taylor Davis led Mundelein (1-3) with 17 points. Becca Woit had 9, while Natalie Busscher and Rachael Millner scored 8 apiece.

Tinley Park sophomore guard Caitlin Sudduth scored 22 points, including two 3-pointers.

Fremd 86, Lakes 44: At Lakes, the host Eagles got 10 points apiece from Ashlee Cunningham, Terese McMahon and Amanda Smith.

Lake Zurich 55, Cary-Grove 30: At Lakes, the Bears' win hiked their record to 3-0.