By Michael Cignoli (For OzarksSportsZone.com)
ASH GROVE — As the Miller girls basketball team has surged through the season, conquering virtually everything in its path, there have been few moments like what it saw Thursday night.
The Cardinals entered the fourth quarter with the odds dramatically stacked against them — they were on the road, clinging to a two-point lead against a conference rival and forced to sit two starters due to foul trouble — and then went the entire period without making a single field goal.
As they have done all season, they found a way to win anyway.
Claudia Hadlock made all but one of her 10 free throws in the final frame, finishing with a game-high 15 points, and the Miller defense had another excellent night to lead the Cardinals to a 44-40 victory over Ash Grove in a battle of the Southwest Conference’s top two teams.
It was Miller’s 18th consecutive victory since a December 5 loss to Class 6 No. 2 Kickapoo, the only blemish on a 21-1 season that now includes 4-0 mark in conference play.
The Cardinals, ranked sixth among the state’s Class 3 schools, have held opponents under 50 points in 20 of their 22 games and surrendered 40 or fewer 14 times. Their current win streak includes road victories over multi-time defending state champions in Walnut Grove and Strafford, and they won their first three conference games by outscoring opponents 221-65.
“Our strategy is to really make a team beat us from the outside,” Hadlock said. “If they can beat us from the inside, it’s really impressive because we play really well defensively. We pack it in. We’re long. We’re lanky. We just try to make them most uncomfortable at all times.”
But Miller never had a comfortable lead in this game, and was never ahead by more than six.
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Ash Grove (13-9, 3-1) cut that down to two going into the fourth quarter. Miller’s Lili Merrick and Kaylee Helton, who combined for 14 points before halftime, did not play for much of the third quarter and the first half of the fourth after getting into foul trouble.
With only two available substitutes on the bench, sophomores Hailey Mart and Haylie Schnake, coach Hannah Wilkerson couldn’t risk either player fouling out with so much time left on the clock. She also couldn’t risk any other player reaching the five-foul mark, so the Cardinals tried to spend as little time on defense as possible.
“We weren’t hitting our outside shots,” Wilkerson said. “We played a little bit rattled tonight. Why not? It’s just that type of game. We just wanted to slow it down. If the ball is in our possession and we’ve got the lead, there’s no way they can score unless we turn it over.”
With no shot clock, possessions that took seconds earlier now took minutes. When Merrick and Helton checked back in with 4:12 left in the fourth, the teams had scored just two points each.
“It’s not fun to watch,” Wilkerson said. “If you want something fun to watch, the Greenwood and Hartville boys are fun to watch. We’re trying to win ball games. I’m not here for anyone’s entertainment. We just wanted to take care of the ball. We didn’t have Kaylee or Lili at the end. We just wanted to take care of the ball and get the ball in our best free-throw shooter’s hands.”
That would be Hadlock, who was 9-of-10 from the line in the final frame and 10-of-12 overall.
With Miller severely limiting its shots in the fourth, the only way Ash Grove was getting the ball was to either steal it or foul whoever had the ball. Five times out of seven, that was Hadlock.
Each time the junior went to the line, the Cardinals were leading by three or fewer points. Come up empty on any of them and Ash Grove was one well-executed shot away from tying the game.
“I knew I just had to knock them down and not think about it — just shoot them and seal the game,” Hadlock said. “I think my teammates believed in me that I could do it, too.”
In her third game back from an ACL injury, Brittany Gilliand hit a corner 3-pointer to cut Miller’s lead to 37-36 with 3:40 to go and came up with a loose ball less than 20 seconds later.
The Pirates put up a shot that rolled around the rim for what felt like an eternity before it fell out.
“We needed the lead because I knew they were going to get into that stall game and they’re money at the free-throw line,” Pirates coach Bryan Dean said. “That’s what we were trying to get away from. That would have helped the strategy because then we could make them be the aggressor instead of just laying back. … If it would have went in, it would have been big.”
Ash Grove had one more chance to tie the game in the final 15 seconds. Down 42-39, Emma McClelland’s 3-pointer was off the mark and Miller hauled in the rebound to end the threat.
Merrick finished with nine points, Helton had eight and Miller’s defense held Missouri State verbal commit Khloe Moad to six points. The junior scored the 1,000th point of her Ash Grove career in a win over Pierce City on Monday and had been a major reason why Ash Grove had won three in a row, five of six and eight of its last 10 since the calendar turned to 2021.
Gilliand’s return from injury has also helped the Pirates find a rhythm, Dean said. She finished with six, McClelland added nine and Emma Eagleburger led Ash Grove with 12 points.
“We’re finally getting our nucleus back,” Dean said. “We’ve got some people healthy again and we got back to what we like to do. We weren’t short on numbers, so we scrambled a lot. We just wanted to get in on them and be aggressive. We knew they wanted to be in that zone because they’re well coached. We wanted to keep stuff simple on the offense and try to confuse them on the defense with our pressure and change in different defenses, maybe wear out some legs on some of their best players by boxing one in and stuff like that. Just trying to throw different curveballs at them.”
But as the fourth quarter showed, Miller is just as capable of changing things up.
“There’s a target on our back and we’ve got to be able to just grind out some wins and do whatever it takes,” Wilkerson said. “Whether it’s scoring 40 points a game or scoring 80 points, it just depends. Just let the game come to us.”
