Hannah Pearsall picks off a pass and scores winning hoop to lift Crusaders past St. James in senior girls basketball semifinals
Article By: Rob Massey (Guelph Mercury Link)
GUELPH — Despite scoring the first 11 points of the game, the Lourdes Crusaders needed a basket with five seconds to play to move on to the District 10 high school senior girls’ basketball league’s semifinals.
Hannah Pearsall picked off a pass at midcourt, then ran in to drop in the winning layup for a 45-43 victory over the St. James Lions Tuesday at St. James.
“All I was thinking was ‘don’t travel’ and ‘make the basket,’ ” she said of the basket. “It could’ve been anyone’s game.”
Pearsall gambled to steal the pass, darting out of a pack of players and grabbing the ball before it reached its intended receiver.
“It was thrown high in the air and I thought I could use my speed to outrun the girls,” said Pearsall, a sprinter on the track team. “I was hoping I didn’t get my fifth foul and get fouled out and they shoot, but I just made a quick decision.”
“That’s why we want to pressure up the floor because it helps us get easier hoops,” Lourdes coach Mark Tonizzo said. “Sometimes on offence we have a tough time working it around and we end up settling for shots from the outside. Our outside shooting becomes better when we get easy ones inside.”
Lourdes led 13-9 at the end of the first quarter and 22-21 at the intermission. The Lions went ahead by a point early in the third quarter, but the Crusaders came back to carry a 33-29 lead into the final quarter.
Victoria Brombal led the Crusaders with nine points while Pearsall, Claire Endicott and Cecilia Hudecki each had eight.
Ashley Benham collected 17 points for St. James while Brittany Gazzola had 13 and Jade McGarr gathered six.
“Before the game, we said ‘don’t get negative, stay positive,’ and we did it,” Pearsall said.
The Crusaders used a 62-40 loss to the Lions at St. James to close the regular season last week as their motivation. That loss cost Lourdes a home game in the quarter-finals and left the Lions and Crusaders with 6-8 records with St. James fourth and Lourdes fifth.
“We played them last week and didn’t really show up,” Tonizzo said. “I think the girls were anxious to play them again.”
Lourdes advances to play the first-place and defending champion Centre Wellington Falcons (13-1) at Fergus in Thursday’s semifinals. The Falcons won both regular-season meeting between the teams, 57-39 at Centre Wellington Sept. 27 and 60-34 at Lourdes Oct. 20.
“We’ve played them twice and we played them really strong the first time,” Tonizzo said. “The second time, not as well. We’ve had a tough time putting together that type of intensity for a whole game. Hopefully they see after this game that they need to play like that the whole time. We don’t have really one player who can just do it for us so it has to be contribution from everyone.”
The other semifinal will pit the third-placed Ross Royals (11-3) against the second-placed Bishop Macdonell Celtics (12-2) at Bishop Mac. They split their regular-season meetings, the Celtics winning 43-34 at Bishop Mac Sept. 29 and the Royals winning 48-46 at Ross Oct. 25.
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