Some early observations from Class 4A girls tournament games

It may not officially be "America's March Madness" as the Illinois High School Association has licensed but the first week and a half of the Class 4A girls basketball tournament was more like a "February Frenzy."

Here are just a few of the strange happenings that I saw.

Foul ball: During last Friday night's Bartlett regional championship game between Bartlett and Wheaton Warrenville South, an oddity occurred late in the fourth quarter.

With 38 seconds remaining, the Tigers' Jayla Johnson drew a foul in the act of shooting after grabbing an offensive rebound. After making her first free throw to trim the Hawks' lead to 33-28, Johnson's second shot was wiped off as officials whistled the Tigers' Maria Dohse for pushing Bartlett's Nicole Gerdevich while both players were lined up in the lane.

Five seconds later, the Tigers fouled Bartlett senior guard Shelley Lyjak in a 1-and-1 situation. That's when there was a conference held at the scorer's table between the two head coaches and three officials.

Confusion quickly set in.

"I was like, 'hey, wait a minute - the foul (on Dohse) came after the shot (from Johnson) was released - it should count,' " said Tigers coach Rob Kroehnke. "It took him (official) forever to finally admit it to me. Once he admitted it, I went to the other guy (official). That's why they stopped play and they all got together.

"They decided to give us the point (free throw) but because we fouled her (Gerdevich) after the shot, the girl that we fouled now deserves to shoot her one-and-one."

Gerdevich converted both foul shots, extending the Hawks' lead to 35-29 with 33 seconds left. Lyjak then missed the front end of her 1-and-1.

"We got one point to give up two points so it really didn't help us," said Kroehnke, who was as baffled by the play as the rest of the crowd - myself included.

"All correctable errors, I'm told," added Kroehnke. "I've never been a part of that. I've never seen it so I'm going to have to ask someone if that was the right call."

Bartlett coach Dave Mello had a clue what was taking place.

"The only reason why I had any idea what the officials were talking about was because we had the exact same situation with East Aurora on our Senior Night," said Mello. "There was a play - something happened - and the next thing I know they (officials) come over and East Aurora is shooting four consecutive free throws.

"This time, Shelley was already waiting at the line when they came over and said Nicole's shooting. The good thing was we had already gone through it so the girls knew what was going on."

Scoreboard, scoreboard: One night earlier, there was a 5- to 7-minute stoppage of play late in the third quarter of the Streamwood regional semifinal clash between Dundee-Crown and Grant.

Dundee-Crown led 31-27 when Grant guard Ally Mahinay connected on a 3-point attempt to make it 31-30 in favor of the Chargers.

However, the scoreboard read just the opposite - Grant 31, Dundee-Crown 30.

While a few observant D-C fans were voicing their disapproval, Chargers coaches began to realize the error and officials called a timeout to sort through the messy situation.

After a lengthy delay, the official scorer sifted through her scorebook and compared it with both teams' books before order was restored and the scoreboard was changed to the correct score - Dundee-Crown 31, Grant 30.

The Chargers closed out the quarter with back-to-back baskets by Paige Gieseke and Allison Michalski to extend their lead to 35-30. Dundee-Crown went on to defeat Grant 46-43 and claimed the regional title one night later, edging top-seeded South Elgin 54-51.

No offense but: Let me make this perfectly clear - I have nothing against high school basketball officials. In fact, I often find it hard to believe they would want to subject themselves to the verbal abuse the men and women in striped shirts receive on an almost nightly basis. More often than not, officials make the correct calls.

For all of the fans out there, I'll repeat my previous comment - MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, OFFICIALS MAKE THE CORRECT CALLS.

However, there must be a shortage of officials when a referee who has obvious problems running up and down the floor is used for a regional championship game.

This happened on back-to-back nights last week. Competency should be required.

Big shot Brie: Leave it to a first-year varsity player to make one of the most important shots of the season for Geneva.

Sophomore guard Brie Borkowicz came off the bench to hit a game-tying 3-pointer from the wing with 5.9 seconds remaining in regulation to force overtime during Monday night's Schaumburg sectional semifinals against Batavia.

The Vikings eventually won 48-44 on Borkowicz's only points of the game.

Craig Brueske can be reached at csb4k@hotmail.com.