By Brennan Stebbins (For OzarksSportsZone.com)
There was a “Final Four” chant inside the gymnasium at Miller High School on Friday night, but it wasn’t one the hometown fans wanted to hear.
Miller’s girls basketball team was playing in the state quarterfinals for the fifth time in six seasons and looking for its first quarterfinal win in that stretch. But it was visiting Norwood that had cause to celebrate on Friday, after the Pirates earned a hard-fought 52-45 win to advance to the Class 2 semifinals for the second year in a row.
“The kids earned it, they played hard” Norwood coach Wayne Jessen said. “We preach defense because we know it travels and by gosh it traveled tonight, thank goodness. They’re such a fun group. They work hard and they listen, they try to do the right things. They’re just good kids, too. I’m blessed.”
Norwood lost to eventual champion Tipton in last year’s semifinals and ended up finishing fourth in Class 2. Now they’ll take on Principia (22-7) at 10 a.m. Wednesday in this year’s Final Four. The Pirates improved to 25-6 with Friday’s win.
They got the victory by holding on through a wild fourth quarter in which they turned a 1-point lead into a 9-point advantage–and then did just enough in the final minutes to fend off a stubborn Miller team. Free throws proved to be pivotal, with the teams combining to take 32 attempts in the final quarter alone.
Norwood fared much better at the charity stripe, though. The Pirates made 15 of 19 attempts in the final eight minutes–and 18 of 26 for the game–while Miller made 7 of 13 in the final frame and 7 of 15 in the game.
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“We like free throws, we’re a good free throw shooting team,” Jessen said. “We like getting in that situation. That helps us more times than not.”
Norwood sophomore Addy Gray did the most damage at the line, making 8 of 10 attempts in the game, all of them in the fourth. Sophomore Autumn Gunter was big, too, making 5 of her 6 attempts in the fourth and 8 of 10 in the game.
And all 19 of Norwood’s free throws in the fourth came in the final four-and-a-half minutes of play.
Norwood led 6-5 after a quarter and the game was tied at 13 at the half before the visitors gained some breathing room with a 28-22 advantage by the end of the third. But it was 28-27 with 6:42 remaining after a three-point play by Miller’s Kendall Neely.
Norwood led 33-31 with less than five minutes to play. Gunter was fouled on a 3-point attempt and made all three freebies at the 4:34 mark, and then Gentry Davault converted a three-point play with 4:05 remaining to make it 39-31.
Miller (21-9) answered with a three-point play from Loghann Leivan with 3:52 on the clock, but Norwood countered a minute and a half later with a three-point play from Gunter that made it 42-34; a free throw from Gray with 1:47 left extended the lead to 9.
The teams then combined for 10 free throws in the next 30 seconds before Miller’s Alexis Bailey connected on a 3-pointer that made it 45-40 with 54 seconds to go. The Cardinals got within a possession, 46-43, following a basket by Rachel Nunez and a Leivan free throw.
It was 48-45 with 19 seconds left after Norwood’s Gray made two free throws and Leivan corralled an offensive rebound and scored.
But then Gray got back to the line and made two more, Miller missed a 3-pointer and Gray iced it with two more free throws with 4.1 seconds on the clock.
“It happened kind of how we thought it would,” Miller coach Ryan White said. “We knew it’d be a close one. They’ve been to where we want to be and we knew they were going to give us a fight. They executed everything very, very well. I’m just proud of our girls and the effort they put in down the stretch. We had a chance there. That’s all you can ask for as a coach.
“They shot well from the free throw line, we didn’t,” he said. “We struggled early on offensively just getting in the groove of the thing. Hats off to them, they had a great game plan and they executed it well.”
“They’ve got a heck of a team,” Jessen said. “Those kids are talented and they’re just sophomores, like most of ours are sophomores, too. I’d say we’ll probably meet in this game hopefully some other times, too. At least I hope we get here. But those Miller kids played hard and I thought they played smart. We just got more shots to go in than they did, that’s all it was.”
