Onondaga — When the Jamesville-DeWitt girls basketball team returned to the court for the fourth quarter of Sunday night’s Section III Class A championship game against Whitesboro at SRC Arena, something unusual was at hand – a game still in doubt.
Having pummeled most of its opposition while rising to the top of the state rankings, the Red Rams had routinely decided matters early, leaving the only question in the final period regarding where the final score would fall.
Here, though, it was different. Whitesboro, denied by J-D in each of the previous three sectional finals, had fought and scrapped with the Rams and, by doing so, only trailed by seven points, creating a small sense of doubt about the outcome.
And then the J-D everyone was familiar with arrived, just in time.
From a barrage of 3-pointers by Carly O’Hern to a defense that shut anything Whitesboro tried, the Rams pulled away to beat the Warriors 52-35 and, for the fifth year in a row, secured the sectional title and earned a chance to go after the state championship that just eluded them in 2014 and 2015.
Part of the challenge Whitesboro gave to J-D came from familiarity. Aside from those three sectional finals, they also met early this season, on Nov. 27, with the Rams rolling past the Warriors 61-35.
Three months later, this was a much Whitesboro team, even though it had barely escaped its sectional semifinal with Indian River, 39-38 on Feb. 21, while J-D had turned back Christian Brothers Academy 50-32 in large part because it shut out the Brothers for the entire second quarter.
Right away, the Warriors demonstrated its toughness, playing J-D to an 11-11 first-quarter stalemate. Even in the second period, as the Rams went in front, paced by Meg Hair’s seven points, Allie Belmont, who had 11 points, allowed Whitesboro to stay within range, only trailing 24-18 at the break.
continued — Baskets by Hair and Julia Kelner allowed the Rams’ margin to grow to double digits in the third quarter, but even that didn’t hold as Whitesboro, scoring the last five points of the period, closed the gap to 35-28.
Not once did the Rams come close to panicking, though. Instead, it cranked up its noted defensive pressure even more, holding the Warriors without a point for the first five minutes, 34 seconds of the fourth quarter.
By then, O’Hern had delivered the decisive blows during a 15-0 run. Following a pair of Hair free throws, O’Hern hit on 3-pointers on consecutive possessions, and was fouled taking another trey – so she promptly made all three free throws.
Of O’Hern’s 12 points, nine of them came in that run. Hair gained a team-high 15 points as Kelner produced eight points and Kasey Vaughan finished with seven points. J-D held Belmont to just two points in the second half, which helped thwart Whitesboro’s efforts.
Now J-D is back in the state tournament again, facing a regional game Wednesday night at 6 p.m. against Section II champion Averill Park at Cicero-North Syracuse High School.
A win there, plus one in Saturday’s regional final at SUNY-Potsdam, would get the Rams back to Troy’s Hudson Valley Community College for the March 11-12 state final four.
