“Potters win with a chip on their shoulder”

Good basketball players can do things they didn’t expect to do when it’s the only way to do them. They invent stuff. It’s more than invention, actually. It’s doing something unusual in the only way it can be done. I’m thinking of a Courtney Jones shot.

It came early in tonight’s game, long before the Morton High School Lady Potters finished a 55-40 victory over a good, stubborn, physical Dunlap team that had lost only once this season.

Jones had the ball near the Potters’ low right block. The sophomore had her back to the baseline. As she stepped toward the lane, she put the ball in her left hand. She did that to keep her body between the ball and a defender. Then, to the defender’s surprise, perhaps even to Jones’s surprise, she put up a left-handed shot from that right side.

Awkward.

Except for one thing.

The ball kissed the backboard softly and fell into the net. Fouled on the shot, Jones then added the free throw.

Once behind 7-1, the Potters made it 7-apiece with Jones’s invention at 1:58 of the first quarter – and never trailed again as they wore down the host Eagles and earned their largest lead at game’s end. The Potters are now 8-1 for the season, 3-0 in the Mid-Illini Conference. Dulap is 6-2, 2-1.

For Morton coach Bob Becker, the victory was meaningful. He called it “a good win, on the road, against a sectional-level team playing with the most confidence they’ve had in a while.” He cited a Twitter poll – this is, after all, a social-media world – that had cast Dunlap as the favorite tonight.

Whether Becker mentioned the Twitter nonsense to his players, I don’t know and didn’t ask. I do know that when the Potters were down 7-1 in the game’s first five minutes, they responded with something like, “Oh, yeah? How many state titles you guys got?” Or, as Becker put it, “We played with a little bit of a chip on our shoulders.”

So the back-to-back-to-back state champions went on a 16-1 run.

The run began, auspiciously enough, with a Tenley Dowell field goal, the kind of hard-earned basket the Potters will need to win big games against tough teams – a Dowell creation off a slashing drive on the left side. In traffic against Dunlap’s strong inside people, the junior star put up a 10-foot jumper for the Potters’ first basket. The game was 5 ½ minutes old. Fouled, Dowell added the one.

Then came the Jones act of ingenuity for the 7-7 tie, followed by a Josi Becker full-court dash with a steal for a 9-7 lead at the quarter.

The Potters made the game theirs in the second quarter. Again, Jones was big. Fouled while going up with an offensive rebound, she made two free throws. It was 11-8, then, when Josi Becker made back-to-back 3-pointers go give the Potters a 9-point lead that never shrank to fewer than four the rest of the way.

I mentioned Jones on offense. She also did good work on defense. Dowell started on defense against Dunlap’s senior star, Kai Koehler, a Division-1 recruit. When Dowell picked up two early fouls, Jones moved over on Koehler. Through the game-defining first half that gave Morton a 25-17 lead, Koehler, under Dowell-Jones pressure, was 0-for-8 from the field and had two points. Bob Becker said, “Courtney gave us a big lift.”

Jones is usually the first Potter off the bench. Tonight she was one of seven or eight off the bench as Becker ran in substitutes strategically and tactically for the full 32 minutes. Asked about the frenzy of subs coming and going, the coach said, “We need to keep all 14 kids engaged. If we’re going to make a deep run in the post-season, and I think we can, all 14 will have to contribute.”

No news in that, for by “deep run” the coach meant he’s thinking of a run at an unprecedented fourth straight state championship by a girls program.

“We have the bar set up here,” he said, and he raised a hand over his head.

Dowell led Morton’s scorers with 22, Josi Becker had 18, Lindsey Dullard 6, Courtney Jones 5, and Caylie Jones 4.