St. Francis stays cool, claims win
Before a minute had even elapsed in Tuesday’s girls basketball game, IC Catholic Prep held a 7-0 lead, scoring on the first three possessions after three St. Francis turnovers.
Spartans coach Mike Phillips quickly called a timeout with 7:05 left on the clock in the first quarter to get his team to regroup and refocus.
St. Francis calmed down and chipped away at its deficit as Regan Kasprak eventually gave her team a lead it never relinquished when she connected on a 3-pointer in the final minute of the quarter, putting the Spartans up 14-13.
St. Francis held the lead the rest of the way, resulting in a 44-42 victory in Suburban Christian Conference play.
“IC has been playing with a lot of confidence and we’re a little on the young side with not a lot of varsity experience, which takes us a little while to get going,” Phillips said. “I was very happy with the energy we displayed after the timeout.”
Grace Vitek scored her team’s first 11 points as she led IC (5-3, 1-2) with a team-high 15, but a baseline layup by St. Francis’ Alexis Long, followed by a basket inside from Reagan Sproat helped give the Spartans the momentum after the Knights’ run to open the game.
Long scored a minute later when she cut to the basket, took a pass from Sproat and made a layup from the right side. Ament followed with a rebound basket, followed by Kasprak’s aforementioned 3-pointer.
The Knights trimmed an 8-point Spartans lead down to 1 with a 7-0 run to close out the first half.
Vitek’s steal and layup with 20 seconds left made the halftime score 25-24, which came on the heels of Rory Manion’s basket inside and subsequent free throw that had trimmed the Spartans lead down to 3.
But St. Francis (5-4, 1-2) held the Knights to just 3 field goals in the third quarter, ending at 36-30 heading into the final eight minutes.
“I think that this group has a lot more potential that, for whatever reason, they’re not displaying and that’s something we need to work out,” IC coach Aubree Lawrence said. “They always play hard, but the mistakes that were made are things we work on every day in practice. So my question to them was ‘when are we going to do the things we’ve been practicing.’”
IC was down by two points on four occasions and also held the Spartans to just one field goal in the fourth quarter, but Sproat, who finished with a game-high 19 points, went 4 for 6 from the free-throw line in the final 1:48 to help secure the win.
“She’s certainly been our go-to person in our nine games so far,” Phillips said of Sproat.