RANDY HISNER
WZBD.com
“I think it’s going to happen when we least expect it.”
That’s what Norwell girls’ basketball coach Eric Thornton said years ago when his dad asked him if he thought he’d ever win a state championship.
Boy, was he right. No one expected a state championship from a Norwell team that returned exactly one player who saw action in their state finals loss to Gibson Southern last year.
But they defied expectations, cruising through the sectional, regional, and semistate before upending the 3A top-ranked and previously unbeaten Greensburg Pirates, 53-44, Saturday evening at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis to secure Norwell’s first state championship in any girls’ sport. (And they did it with no seniors in the starting lineup.)
The key? In a word, defense.
The Knights trap, they swarm, they harass. They stop just short of assault and they use their vaunted 1-3-1 trapping zone to disrupt their opponents’ offense. The strategy worked. Norwell held the Pirates to 23 points below their season average and forced them into 19 turnovers while hampering their shot selection.
“Our defense tonight was very, very disruptive,” Thornton said. “I thought the shots that they took were a result of our kids forcing them to take unorthodox shots, maybe a little quicker than they wanted to or maybe off balance a little bit. I thought we gave very little to them that was easy tonight.”
So flummoxed were the Pirates by Norwell’s tenacious defense that they shot only 31% from the field (compared to 49.4% for the season). That included an abysmal 14% on threes, less than half of their normal accuracy of 32.2%.
The Knights didn’t exactly shoot the lights out, either. They were 32% from the field, including 20% on threes, both percentages well below their season averages of 38.1% and 33.6%, respectively.
The big offensive advantage for the Knights came from the free throw line, where they hit 12-of-20 while the Pirates got to the line only 10 times, hitting just four.
In the first quarter, the Knights, after spotting the Pirates a 5-0 lead, scored seven straight points on Addie Norris’s three and Vanessa Rosswurm’s put back and stop-and-pop jumper. The teams traded baskets the rest of the period, with Norris giving the Knights a 13-11 lead with her baseline drive at the 29-second mark.
Greensburg got a pair of baskets from super-soph Claire Larrison and two more from 6-1 senior forward Leah West to win the second quarter by that same 13-11 tally, leaving the teams tied at the half, 24-24.
“We felt we left some things out there—some things at the rim, just finishing plays defensively where we let an offensive rebound happen,” said Thornton of his team’s performance in the first half. “We really needed to clean some things up.”
Clean them up they did. After allowing the Pirates to take a 28-26 lead at the 5:00 mark on Larrison’s jumper, the Knights went on a 13-2 run to take a 39-30 lead with 2:09 to go. Rosswurm and Norris started it with back-to-back drives. Rosswurm added a conventional three-point play, followed by Macie Saalfrank’s three-pointer from the top of the key and Jada Dale’s rally-capping three-point play.
Though West scored the final three points of the quarter on a free throw and nifty Euro-step drive, that still left the Knights with a 39-33 advantage heading into the fourth.
“That third quarter was just huge for our mood, to get some momentum on our side,” Thornton noted. “We really needed that. It got the crowd going for us; our kids felt that.”
The Knights’ quick start to the final period put them in control. The Pirates had the first possession, but Rosswurm stole the ball near half court and drove in for two just 13 seconds into the quarter. Seventeen seconds later, after a defensive stop, Saalfrank nailed her second three, and suddenly the Knights had the first double-digit lead of the game at 44-33.
The Pirates climbed back within six at 47-41 with 2:28 left, but in the last two minutes Norris hit 4-of-6 free throws and Rosswurm hit 2-of-2, increasing the lead and delighting a raucous Norwell crowd.
Thornton, the architect of the don’t-rebuild-just-reload Norwell program, was quick to credit his players for the championship.
“The composure of this group, I think, is beyond its years of experience and grade level, and I just can’t say enough about our kids,” he said. “They deserve this; this is their team.”
He credited the supportive Norwell community too. “The people in our community and our program are what make our program so special,” he said. “This is for all of them.”
The turning point for his team this season, Thornton thinks, was their 47-44 loss to Bellmont on January 18. “That feeling in the locker room of not being the tougher team is something that this group had to overcome,” he said. The Knights avenged that loss by defeating Bellmont in the sectional final. In their semistate championship game win they did the same thing to Columbia City, the other NE8 foe who beat them in the regular season. The Knights won 11 straight games after the Bellmont loss to finish 23-6. Greenburg ends at 27-1.
Thornton had special praise for Norris, the 5-7 junior guard who was averaging 6.6 points coming into the game. She more than doubled her average with 16 points, collected a game-high four steals, and blocked four shots. “She fought as hard as you can ask anybody to fight,” he said. “She was just going to find a way to get it done down there for us (at the bottom of their 1-3-1). And then offensively I thought she was so aggressive, and she was able to get to the rim. She went out and was a great leader for us tonight. We’ve seen that from her throughout the tournament.”
Rosswurm, the only returning starter from last year, was also crucial to the win with her double-double of 17 points and 10 rebounds. She led the team with four assists and added three steals.
Saalfrank was the third Knight in double figures with 13. Ashley Waldman added four, Dale three.
Greensburg’s West, who tied Rosswurm for game scoring honors with 17 points and led both teams in rebounds with 17, was named the Roy Mental Attitude winner. She will play at Belmont University next year.
Larrison was the only other Pirate in double figures with 13.
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