By Kary Booher
Mountain Grove, MO – It was one thing for the Plato Eagles to be a No. 13 seed in a 16-team tournament. But that wasn’t their motivation Tuesday.
Instead, flip the calendar back to early December, when Plato suffered a 20-point loss to Willow Springs.
This time, Kendall Hall scored 16 points, Janet Garrett added 15 and Plato’s endless combination of defenses helped exact revenge in a 62-51 victory against Willow Springs in a quarterfinal of the Mountain Grove Tournament.
Plato will play top-seed Gainesville at 5 p.m. Wednesday in a semifinal.
“We knew we had to go out there and play a better ballgame,” Garrett said. “And we played a good team game.”
Plato (6-5) and Willow Springs (6-5) played mostly even until midway through the second quarter. At that point, Garrett found her shooting touch, and it seemed to do the same for teammates.
The Eagles went from trailing 20-18 to leading 32-23 at halftime as five different players scored. The advantage hit 11 early in the third quarter and expanded to as many as 16 points.
Asked what was different this time against Willow Springs, Plato coach Rich Mueller said, “We played, for one. And we changed up our defense. We played four different defenses and got them out of sync.”
The defense was such a key that Willow Springs went 3 minutes without a field goal during one stretch of the third quarter. The drought proved decisive when Garrett hit a 3-pointer just before the end of the stanza, boosting Plato’s lead to 15 points, 48-33.
“We knew our defense was going to be the most important thing,” Hall said. “It was really bad the last time we played them.”
Said Garrett, “We knew we had to go at them and play our best game.”
Devin Perkins scored 14 points and Kianna Rothermich added nine for Willow Springs, which plays at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday.
“We lost focus and weren’t getting good shots,” Willow Springs coach D.J. Gutscher said of the second quarter. “The biggest story of the night was rebounding. They beat us on the glass with second opportunities. And we weren’t crashing the boards to get those same opportunities.”
