TACOMA — The Meadowdale Mavericks were toast.
Finished.
Stick-a-fork-in-them done.
People’s expectations for Meadowdale as it opened last week’s Class 4A state girls basketball tournament were less than rosy and the Mavericks were doing their best to live up to those expectations with a lackluster first-half effort against Kentwood.
The Conquerors led 36-20 at halftime and then scored a pair of baskets in the first minute of the third quarter to seize a commanding 40-20 advantage.
It would have been easy for Meadowdale to call it a night and phone it in for the remaining nine minutes of the second half.
But the Mavericks refused to give in to temptation and slowly began clawing their way back into the game. Meadowdale cut the 20-point deficit into a more manageable 10 points by the end of the third quarter.
The Mavericks continued to battle in the fourth quarter, eventually tying the score at 56 on a basket by freshman Hanna Fjortoft with 24 seconds left in the game.
Meadowdale’s miracle comeback, however, wasn’t to be, though it wasn’t for lack of effort.
Fjortoft’s tough defense on Kentwood resulted in a jump ball with the possession arrow pointing the Conquerors’ direction with 10.5 seconds left in the game.
Junior guard Courtney Vandersloot then drove into the lane and put up a shot that missed the basket. Teammate Megan Tyler somehow got a hold of the ball just underneath the hoop and was able to avoid stepping out of bounds, while she passed the ball to freshman Jessie Genger.
Genger nailed a 3-foot shot with one second left to stun the Mavericks 58-56 in a first-round game March 8 at the Tacoma Dome.
It was Genger’s only basket of the game. Meadowdale did not in-bounds the ball, but the clock kept running and time ran out.
“That’s a hard way to lose — at the buzzer,” senior center Caitlyn Rohrbach said. “I’m proud of my team for fighting back. We’ve got three more ball games. We’ve got to focus and get it done.”
First-year Meadowdale coach Dan Taylor didn’t recognize his team in the first half. The Mavericks struggled from the field, making only 32 percent of their shots from the field. Kentwood shot 56 percent in the first half.
The second half saw a dramatic turnaround for both teams as Meadowdale connected on a sizzling 63 percent of its shots, while Kentwood cooled off to 32 percent.
“That wasn’t our ball team the first half,” Taylor said. “The second half we just told them in the locker room we needed to focus on the fundamentals that we do best and that’s going to help us get back into this ball game.”
Taylor told his team that “it’s going to take inch by inch. It’s not going to be take trying to shoot a bunch of 3s. It’s going to take inch by inch, trying to get a stop and a bucket, a stop and a bucket.”
The buckets came mainly from four players, who scored in double figures. Fjortoft scored a team-high 14 points. Junior guard Marelle Moehrle added 13 points and Rohrbach had 12. Sophomore guard Eryn Jones scored 11 points.
Meadowdale was without two senior starters who were dismissed from the team in mid-February due to violations of the Edmonds District athletic code.
“I never lost faith in my team,” said Rohrbach, who is the only senior on the team. “We had to work hard and get after it and fight to the finish. There was never a doubt in my mind that we couldn’t come back.”
Meadowdale had problems stopping junior guard Vandersloot in the first half. The Kentwood standout scored 16 of her game-high 24 points in the first half.
Taylor and his players knew they had to pay attention to Vandersloot coming into the game.
“We had her scouted out,” Taylor said. “They didn’t recognize that she’s going to create for everybody and create for herself. Once they actually realized that we were able to stop her or at least tame her.”
Herald writer Darren Fessenden contributed to this story.
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