Lady Potters 50, Canton 37
So Addy Engel, bumping into folks, stumbling in heavy traffic, gets rid of the ball. If you’re kind, you say Addy Engel put up a little shot from the low right box. But you can’t really call it a shot. The best you can say, in coachese, is she “attacked the basket.” Just ride a little bump’em cars, hurl the rock up there, hope to draw a foul and two.
But when there was no whistle, here is what Addy Engel did not do next.
She did not go oh-gosh-darn, nor did she sulk even a ltitle bit.
Here is what she did do.
Over Canton’s bigger people, the 5-foot-10 junior forward Addy Engel ripped the clunker-shot rebound from their hands and on a second try put it softly off the glass for two.
It was no big deal, the Potters already up by five, but it was no little deal, either, because up by seven with seven minutes to play is better than up by five.
Besides, here came a repeat.
This time the 5-8 junior guard Izzy Hutchinson came flying in – “attacked” is an inadequate verb when Hutchinson comes flying in sideways, crossways, and every way but upside-down to try one of her improbable “layups,” an inadequate noun – and, of course, this improbability clanged off the rim, and again no whistle, no foul.
And Izzy Hutchinson, not even jumping because she had barely straightened out from the flight in, lost among the bigs under the hoop, somehow came up with the ball and – I cannot swear to this, but I will swear to it anyway – she had her back to the basket when she flipped the ball skyward, it fell onto the rim, and sat there, sat there, sat there, and perhaps the earth’s rotation had something to do with what happened next.
The ball rotated east, toward Carlock, ever so slowly, a leather pebble at a time.
And crawled into the net.
Up by nine if better than up by seven.
And one minute later, here came 5-10 sophomore forward Julia Laufenberg. She took a pass on right wing. She had taken such a pass in the fourth quarter of the psychol-thriller comeback against East St. Louis. As she had done that time, she did this time, too. A 3-pointer, smooth, easy, beautiful.
Up by a dozen is better than up by nine.
\And when 5-7 senior Tatym Lamprecht followed a minute later with a 3 of her own, the Potters had declared this one theirs.
They’re now on a six-game winning streak after a season-opening loss at Rock Island, where they let a 10-point lead disappear in the fourth quarter.
The issue tonight was never in doubt. Canton came in with a 6-3 record that included a three-point victory over the Rock Island team that beat Morton by three. But when the Potters led after a quarter, 12-5, I made two notes that suggested the outcome: “M lots of steals, lots of missed layups.”
“Missed” was too harsh a judgment on those layups and those moments of attack that didn’t work.
“I felt bad for the kids,” Bob Becker, the Potters coach, said. “It can be a frustration. Sometimes you can do everything perfectly and the ball just doesn’t go in the basket. They were getting good shots, they just weren’t going in. It’s a crazy game.”
Then came that fourth quarter when even missed shots led to put-backs that were catalysts for 15-5 run that moved Morton ahed 47-32.
Game over, and Becker liked most of what he saw: “I like our team. I think they’ ve got a little resiliency, a little grit about them, and I think they’re believing they can be pretty good.”
Morton’s scoring:
Engel 19, Lamprecht 12, Ellie VanMeenen 9, Hutchinson 6, Laufenberg 3, Magda Lopko 1.
(And this winner’s statistic: Morton was 16 of 23 on free throws, Canton 4 of 5.)