Squires Take TRC Finale From Valley
AKRON — As a player at Triton High School back in the early 2000s and then as a five-year coach of Manchester girls basketball, Jake Everett had never won a game at Tippecanoe Valley. His Lady Squires gave him his first victory in Akron in thrilling fashion Thursday, and it was one that mattered.
Manchester rallied past host Valley with a 15-11 fourth period in both teams’ Three Rivers Conference-closer, clinching a share of the conference crown and spoiling the Lady Vikings’ senior night by a narrow 43-40 margin.
“As a coach or a player coming into this area playing against some really good Coach (Bill) Patrick teams, playing against really good Coach (Chris) Kindig teams, I’ve never seen a victory or walked out of here with a victory. It’s always been a bus ride home in defeat,” recalled Everett. “This one wasn’t necessarily my doing in that the girls were the ones who made the plays. The girls were the ones who made the shots and played the defense. All you can do as a coach is to ask the girls to go out there and execute the game plan that you think will put you in a good position to win. And that’s what happened.
“ I couldn’t be more elated for the girls.”
The game, which guaranteed at least a share of the TRC title for the victor as the opponents both entered the contest with identical 7-1 marks in league play, was nip-tuck the entire way. The showdown featured a total of eight lead changes and five ties, and neither team was able to get more than a two-possession cushion over the other until a 4-0 spurt by the Squires late in the fourth lent the visitors a 37-31 advantage. Valley was able to tie it up one final time on Jillian Walls’ three from the corner on an Emma Craig skip pass with 51 seconds to go, but Manchester players buried 5 of 6 free throws down the stretch — part of a 10-of-14 effort from the foul line in the fourth period — to hold off their hosts.
“I’m not real happy about fouling there when you’ve got the ball game tied, but you get in that mode where we’re down six points and you’re trying to push and push,” said Kindig. “I didn’t have any timeouts left. We should’ve just got back on defense and tried to dig in, but obviously we had a foul there and that kind of turns it back over. But we had our other chances. We did.”
“I think we’re evolving into a free throw shooting team. I think that this only prepares the girls to be able to hit those free throws when we get to sectional next week,” explained Everett. “I think the pressure of the possessions, the pressure of knowing we’re down, and Emma West, she hits one of two when we need her to and then Jirni (Cripe), being up one and she’s got two free throws, to hit both of those is really clutch and crucial.”
Manchester’s defense limited the Vikings to 14-of-50 (28 percent) field shooting. In particular, the Squires limited DI prospect Sophie Bussard to just 5-of-15 shots from the floor, holding her to only four attempts and two points in the first half. The senior scored seven during the critical fourth period to finish her final game at Valley with 12 points.
“She’s going to get buckets. I think we did a good job of limiting her second touch,” said Everett of Bussard. “She can bring the ball up and get into their offense, but when she passes it, then we tried to limit that when she’s catching it. And when she’s catching it we always try to have two here, and that really limited her. We made other people shoot shots that really didn’t want to.”
“I thought we needed to get a little bit more out of her, obviously. They were guarding her pretty hard, but that’s not anything we haven’t seen. We’ve seen it all year so there weren’t any surprises there as far as the type of defenses we were seeing,” said Kindig.
“You look at it, as poorly as we shot the ball tonight, we still had an opportunity. We had it tied with, what, 15, 20 seconds to go. I felt good if we can get it into overtime. I think we shot 25 percent or so for the game. It’s difficult to win a basketball game when you shoot that percentage. We haven’t shot this poorly all year. I can’t think of one game where we shot the ball this poorly.”
While Bussard notched a team-high 12, Craig scored nine points working on the interior against Manchester’s stout defense. But that combo was single-handedly outdone by Squires senior guard Kennedy Fierstos and her 22 points. Fierstos knocked down four three-pointers and buried a key pair of free throws with the game tied up one final time with 40 seconds left to play to keep her team out front.
“I thought their post player was pretty active tonight as far as getting the ball in the middle and kind of breaking us down at times. What that does, you get the ball in the middle that creates opportunities to kick it back out for threes or whatever,” explained Kindig. “Fierstos hit some tough shots tonight. She’s a senior, right? She played like a senior tonight.”
“She hit that three in the fourth quarter that was huge. She got to the free throw line and made her free throws. She’s definitely our senior leader,” Everett said. “She’s the girl that is not going to be afraid of that moment. She’s not going to back down from that moment, and she stepped up to the free throw line when we needed her to and she had that look in her eye that she wasn’t going to miss and she didn’t. I couldn’t be prouder of the work that she puts in. She’s a girl that works hard, and everything that she’s gotten she’s deserved. It was definitely a great game by Fierstos.”
With the win, Manchester closed the regular season at 15-7 with an 8-1 TRC mark, tying for conference co-championship honors for the first time in nine years alongside Northfield, which handed host Rochester a lopsided 59-27 defeat in TRC action Thursday. The Squires will play Rochester in Sectional 37 action on their home floor next Tuesday.
Valley closed the regular season at 15-6 meanwhile, with a 7-2 mark in TRC play for third place in the final conference standings. Valley drew a bye at Class 3A Sectional 21 and will wait to play the winner of the West Noble tourney-opener between Wawasee and Lakeland in Friday’s early semifinal, scheduled for 6 p.m.
“We’ve tried to do this all year — whether it’s a win or a loss, you can’t do anything about the past. We just have to keep working. We’ve got basically a week off here to keep working,” said Kindig.
Also Thursday, Valley’s JV won its game with Manchester, 25-22. Brayden Baney put up 12, and Karina Young finished with nine to lead the JV Vikings. Ainsley West finished with seven to pace Manchester in that game.