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Wilson scores 10, McCarter adds 9 for Rochester
BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS
Sports Editor, RTC
NAPPANEE — The first half of the Rochester girls basketball team’s game against host NorthWood at the Panther Pit Saturday was exactly what coach Joel Burrus hoped for.
The second half was not.
Aubrey Wilson scored 10 points, and Ella McCarter added nine, but the Lady Zs lost 49-31.
Relying on a man-to-man defense, NorthWood went on a 16-0 run in the third quarter to expand their lead to 34-13. They led by as many as 26 points in the fourth quarter.
Haylee Heflin scored 17 points to lead NorthWood, who made it to semistate in Class 3A last year. Fellow senior Payne, an Appalachian State volleyball signee, had 16 points and 12 rebounds operating out of the post.
Five different NorthWood players made a 3-pointer.
Rochester has lost three consecutive years to the Lady Panthers. They have averaged 26.3 points per game in those games. Burrus said that his team’s offense is further along now than it was at a similar point in the season the last two years.
But he also called the Panther Pit “a bear of a place to win.”
“It’s packline man,” Burrus said in describing NorthWood’s defense. “So they will get up in your shirt because even though it doesn’t look like it, they’ve got help all over the floor. They will hard-hug you in a closeout. They’re not afraid of you going around them. And then they rotate, and they’ll switch, and they can do a lot of different things, and they’ve got four girls out there on the floor that can guard four different positions. And then they just hide Payne in there as basically a basket protector. They have her play the square, so elbow to elbow, block to block.”
NorthWood scored the first seven points of the game and never trailed. Rochester trailed 13-5 at one point in the second quarter before Wilson hit a pullup 10-footer as she was fouled. A McCarter 3-pointer cut the lead to 3.
“They’re a quick and aggressive team, and they play uptempo,” NorthWood coach Taylor Burkhart said. “We knew we had to close out under control. And the goal was to get a hand up every time no matter who has the ball. Because pretty much everyone, it looked like, has the green light to shoot the ball. And one starts hitting and two start hitting, and the team just builds off that. So that was a big game plan going in – making sure that we not only get a hand up, but we want them to put the ball on the floor so they can’t take those shots.”
After two straight Payne putbacks to open the second half, McCarter hit Audrey Bolinger in the post with a nifty bounce pass, and Bolinger converted a 3-point play after being fouled by Payne.
Shortly thereafter, Burkhart called timeout with his team leading 18-13.
“We knew that they were going to come with a big punch, a big wave, whatever you want to say,” Burrus said. “I thought they’d come out and press in that third quarter to try to get things going. It was a chess match in that first half, which is exactly what we had hoped for. They play just such good defense that if you make mistakes out here in between the circles, they’re going to make you play. So we had a couple miscues in between the circles, and they went and laid it in. And then I think we had a 3 that we missed, and we had everybody down inside the paint – it was kind of a 1-4-type look – and we missed the 3 in the corner, it bounced straight out to 22 (Heflin), and she went and ripped it again.”
Burrus said they double-teamed Payne in the post, but players like Heflin, Ella Branham and Addie Davis are such good shooters that if Payne kicks back out to a teammate when she is double-teamed, it results in an open 3-point look.
Burrus said Audrey Bolinger “did a real good job” on Payne, especially given that she was four inches shorter than Payne.
“They really put you in a bind if they’ve got Payne in the block on ball side, and they’ve got their shooter 12 (Ella Branham) in that ballside corner,” Burrus said. “Because it puts your wing in a bind because we were trying to double. We had to.”
Burkhart said he used the timeout to make offensive adjustments.
“We had to adjust our gameplan a little bit,” Burkhart said. “And if that’s what I’m thinking of, we brought Payne up a little bit and started to attack the basket more. We were settling for 3s a lot, and if the 3s are falling, great, but if they’re not, we have to start to attack the basket. We tried to open things up a little bit. I think it worked out, and then I think our best 3 is an inside-out, and we started doing that.”
NorthWood 49, Rochester 31
ROCHESTER (31) (3-1)
Aubrey Wilson 3 3-5 10, Rylee Clevenger 2 0-0 6, Brailyn Hunter 0 1-2 1, Ella McCarter 2 4-6 9, Audrey Bolinger 1 3-3 5, Emma Mathias 0 0-0 0, Constance Velez 0 0-0 0, Kyla Conley 0 0-0 0, Jayla Miller 0 0-0 0
TEAM: 8 11-16 31
NORTHWOOD (49) (3-0)
Megan Yoder 0 0-0 0, Kinzee Hartman 1 0-0 3, Ella Branham 1 2-2 5, Haylee Heflin 6 4-4 17, Claire Payne 6 4-6 16, Addie Davis 2 0-0 5, Tessa Branham 0 0-0 0, Brooke Johnson 1 0-0 3, Emily Miller 0 0-0 0, Ella Balasa 0 0-0 0
TEAM: 17 10-12 49
Three-point field goals:
Rochester 4 (Clevenger 2, Wilson, McCarter),
NorthWood 5 (Heflin, E. Branham, Davis, Hartman, Johnson)
Total fouls: Rochester 10, NorthWood 16
Turnovers: Rochester 13, NorthWood 9
Score by quarters
Rochester 5 5 8 13 – 31
NorthWood 10 4 22 13 – 49
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