By Drew Goodman / Scrimmageplaycva.com contributor
Watching the opening half of Friday’s 3C Regional Championship Game between Spotswood and Western Albemarle, the casual observer might not have known that the Warriors were playing with tired legs.
The top-seeded Trailblazers had been off since Tuesday, but the No. 2 Warriors endured a grueling overtime battle in a win-or-go-home clash with Brookville less than 24 hours prior.
Facing its toughest test of the season to date and with leading scorer Elisabeth Coffman wearing a protective mask, the Warriors hung with Spotswood for 16 minutes, trailing by just seven points at intermission.
Once the third quarter whistle blew, however, fatigue began to sink in, and the top-ranked Blazers flexed their muscles on both ends of the floor.
Spotswood reeled off two easy buckets in the first 26 seconds of the third quarter and cruised to a 44-26 triumph on Monticello High School’s home floor.
“I told the kids in the locker room that, ‘In some ways, I thought you guys had as much guts tonight as you had [in Thursday’s semifinal win over Brookville]’, but it doesn’t show on the scoreboard,” Western Albemarle head coach Kris Wright said. “We showed up and we competed. We kept hanging in there and hanging in there… We kept competing and kept trying, we just weren’t able to execute as much as we normally like to.”
The Warriors will await the champion of Region 3D — still to be decided with region semifinals Saturday — and they’ll square off with them Friday night.
Coffman epitomized the toughness Wright said his team displayed in Friday’s loss. The senior broke her nose and received three stitches in her face in the wake of an injury in the opening minute of Thursday night’s game. She returned to the court Friday and notched Western’s first four points.
Later on, following Spotswood’s two quick buckets to open the second half, Coffman calmly knocked down a jumper to prevent the Blazers from completely running away with the game early.
Coffman wore the black mask for roughly 30 seconds at Western’s gym Friday afternoon before trying it out for real during warmups.
Despite having her vision impaired by the protective mask and being the focal point of the Spotswood defense, Coffman played nearly the entire game and led the Warriors with 10 of her team’s 26 points.
“That’s just a gutsy kid,” wright said. “The 107th start of her career tonight, so there was no doubt when she decided that she was going to play, that she was going to start. I thought she handled herself fairly well. She had a little trouble with it, but adjusted, and after that, I thought she played pretty well for what [Spotswood] does to you.”
Spotswood stretched its lead to double digits following a three-point play by Stephanie Ouderkirk midway through the third quarter, and never looked back.
The battle inside between Spotswood’s Ouderkirk and Nakalia Gray and Western Albemarle bigs Sydney Sherman and Caity Driver helped define the game. The Warriors played solid interior defense on Ouderkirk for the first eight minutes before the talented forward exploded for 15 of her game-high 17 points over the next three quarters. Gray was a difficult matchup as well, finishing with 12 big points for the Trailblazers.
Driver countered with eight points of her own, including back-to-back layups to pull the Warriors to within five late in the first half.
On the heels of Sherman’s 17-point performance on Thursday against the Bees, Ouderkirk and the Blazers limited the Western junior to just one field goal in Friday’s contest.
Spotswood was able to establish its brand of transition offense in the second half, and Ouderkirk was the biggest beneficiary of all of those open looks in the paint.
The Blazers spent the bulk of the fourth quarter killing the clock en route to their second straight Region Championship.
The win marked Spotswood’s 24th victory of the season by 13 points or more, but the Blazers struggled to gain any real separation until the second half. Spotswood led by just three late in the first quarter and did not built a double-digit advantage until the third.
Spotswood head coach Chris Dodson has seen Wright’s team plenty over the years, and was impressed with the toughness that the tired Warriors displayed in the first half.
“I think [Western]’s size affected us a whole lot in tonight’s game. [Wright] does a remarkable job over here night in and night out,” Dodson said. “We had 10 game films, we watched some of these guys and tried to prepare, and we came out and forget it all, maybe because they do so much.”
