MT. VERNON — Forget about rust accumulating during a six-day layoff between games at the 2A District 1 girls basketball tournament.
Archbishop Murphy’s collective hot touch ignited a 19-3 first-half scoring surge and the Wildcats rode the momentum to their 21st consecutive victory and second straight district championship title with a 53-43 win over Burlington-Edison Friday night at Mount Vernon High School.
Senior guard Shelby Lyman, a Cornell University signee, scored 13 points and fellow senior Nickole Bartholomew added 13 and helped keep Burlington-Edison junior Kristine Thoe from falling into a rhythm offensively.
Thoe, who averages 13.9 points per game, finished with five points and the Tigers (20-3 overall) shot 32 percent from the field (16-for-53).
“I pretty much just face-guarded her the whole time,” Bartholomew said, “and I had a lot of help from Shelby (Lyman) and Sam (Pettinger) who were guarding the non-shooters … so that helped a lot.”
Burlington-Edison senior Brenna Anderson, a 6-foot-1 forward who averages 14.8 points and has scholarship offers from a few Division II and III programs, scored a team-high 13 points for the Tigers.
Archbishop Murphy’s experience shined through as the team’s five senior starters, all of whom experienced the Wildcats’ (21-2) run to second-place at the 2A state tournament last season, scored 49 of Archbishop Murphy’s 53 points. Lyman scored nine first-half points and the Wildcats shot 56 percent from the field (14-for-25) for a 13-point advantage at halftime.
“That gets the momentum going everywhere,” Bartholomew said of the team’s hot touch from the field. “Like on defense, it kind of picks everybody’s intensity up and you just start to get pumped up.”
“We wanted to make sure that two of their better scorers, Anderson and Thoe, didn’t go off in the first half, and I thought we did a really good job defensively with that,” Archbishop Murphy head coach John Barhanovich said. “Then we made some nice passes and did a really nice job shooting it. … We slowed them (Burlington-Edison) down on offense because of the plan we had and the girls worked that to perfection.”
Sam Pettinger, a University of the Pacific (Stockton, Calif.) signee and Archbishop Murphy’s all-time assists leader, scored four points and helped push the offense with nine assists, including two pin-point passes to freshman Beth Carlson — the second of which gave the Wildcats a 31-19 lead with 2 minutes, 33 seconds remaining in the first half.
In the key, 6-2 center Savannah Fletcher helped contain the Tigers‘ Anderson and grabbed a team-high nine rebounds coupled with 11 points.
“They got the hot hand,” Burlington-Edison head coach Mike Buckholz said. “… Shelby (Lyman) just got really hot and then later on we started collapsing on their dribble penetration and they started kicking it to (Nickole) Bartholomew and they did a nice job tonight, they played well.”
After coming close to perfection last season, two straight losses to open the regular season quickly eliminated the question of whether or not the Wildcats would go undefeated this year.
Since the loss to Lynden in the state title game last season and close losses to 4A Kamiak and 3A Mercer Island, the Wildcats are 21-0 and set for another run through next week’s state tournament in Yakima.
“It’s kind of tough to win it a couple times in a row,” Barhanovich said of the district title. “… We gave them the goal ‘let’s go back and defend our title,’ and they did a nice job.”
“Last year was definitely a good experience because it was our first time (winning the district tournament), but this year the teams are super good,” Pettinger said. “Just on the bus ride here we were all super excited, it wasn’t really nervous, it was just we were excited and now we have to look forward to state.”
At Mt. Vernon H.S.
Murphy1817162—53
B-E139417—43
Archbishop Murphy—B. Carlson 4, Farrell 0, Erickson 0, Lyman 13, Bartholomew 13, Vincent 0, Pettinger 4, Fletcher 11, Rasmussen 0, Nelson 0, Meehan 0, M. Carlson 8. Burlington-Edison—Swanson 0, Arndt 1, Houston 0, Thoe 5, Rabenstein 0, Mataya 5, Edwards 9, Swagerty 0, Anderson 13, Youngquist 6, Torset 3, Brown 0. 3-point goals—Lyman 3, Bartholomew 3, Thoe 1, Mataya 1, Anderson 3. Records—Archbishop Murphy 21-2. Burlington-Edison 20-3.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
