Don’t look now, but Hempfield is in the Elite Eight. Congrats to the Black Knights, who continued to work their postseason magic with a second-round victory over University City on Tuesday night. Here is my story from Wednesday’s New Era.
COATESVILLE – So you’re sifting through your brackets, looking for that Cinderella team.
No, no. Not those brackets.
We’re talking about the PIAA girls’ basketball Quad-A bracket, silly.
In that bracket - which was blown to smithereens when two perennial powers, Altoona and Oakland Catholic, lost in the first round - Cinderella is still on the dance floor.
Junior forward Analicia Evans scored 10 points, Hempfield made 11 fourth-quarter foul shots and the Black Knights - aka Cinderella - slipped past District 12 fourth-place finisher University City 47-40 in a PIAA second round game Tuesday night at Coatesville High School.
“Elite Eight,” Hempfield coach Lenny Groft said. “Who would have thought it?”
Considering Hempfield finished third in Section 1, didn’t make the league playoffs, and finished sixth in District 3, not many people.
But here are the Knights, headed to the state quarterfinals for the first time in school history.
Up next for Hempfield (23-6 overall) is District 1 fifth-place finisher Cheltenham, which knocked out District 3 champ Harrisburg 55-43 in another second-round game at Coatesville on Tuesday.
That game will be Friday at a site and time to be announced. The winner will get the survivor of District 7 fourth-place Bethel Park (25-4) and District 7 third-place Upper St. Clair (24-5) in a state semifinal game next Tuesday.
Hempfield, which is in the Western (lower) end of the bracket, is the highest-remaining seed still dancing in Quad-A.
“We’re extremely proud,” said Hempfield junior guard Ellie Steward, who scored seven of her eight points in the second half Tuesday, including a transition basket that gave the Knights a 28-27 lead heading into the fourth.
“We’ve really come together and we’re playing the best we’ve played all season right now,” she said. “It’s exciting to be getting the job done when not many people thought we’d be here.”
University City (19-10) jumped out to a 5-0 lead and was perfectly content with running time off the clock and pounding the ball underneath to 6-0 sophomore forward Markel Walker, who averages 21.9 points a game.
She scored a game-high 20 and grabbed 10 boards, as University City owned the glass, outrebounding Hempfield 40-27.
But the game changed dramatically in the third, when Hempfield turned up its defensive pressure and changed the tempo of the game, which was deadlocked at 15 at the break.
“They slowed the game down in the first half, but we were able to play the game the way we wanted to play in the second half,” Steward said. “And that helped us get it done.”
The Knights trapped and used a 1-3-1 zone to shake things up a bit to start the second half. Hempfield forced seven turnovers in the third and 25 in the game.
The Knights also took care of the ball, turning it over just 11 times.
“We wanted to play a faster-paced game and come out and pick them up full-court,” said Hempfield senior forward Chelsea Bowman, who scored all eight of her points in the second half, including back-to-back buckets to open the fourth, the latter giving the Knights a 32-29 lead.
“We wanted to speed up the game and play our tempo, instead of just standing around on defense,” she said. “We stepped it up in the second half and showed them that we were ready to play and that we wanted to win the game.”
Hempfield, which upset District 6 champ Altoona in the first round, seized control when junior guard Hannah Miller drilled a jumper to give the Knights the lead for good, 38-37, with 2:14 to play.
“That was a huge shot,” Steward noted.
That’s also when Hempfield did two things:
First, Groft had Steward and reserve guard Samantha Holker, who are smaller, quicker guards, defend Walker, who earlier had a field day slicing through the lane.
It worked: Walker had just one field goal over the final three minutes.
Second, Hempfield made eight free throws over the final 1:36 to ice it.
And that was huge, considering Bowman, the Knights’ leading rebounder, fouled out with 2:43 to play.
“It was nerve-wracking,” Bowman said, “but I had faith in the team and I knew they could do it.”
The Knights did indeed do it, and have now gone further than any basketball team in the history of the program.
“It’s nice to be playing in March,” Groft said with a smile.
It’s also nice when you win in March.
Also Tuesday:
Emmaus 45, Cedar Crest 34
In Shillington, the L-L League champs saw their season come to a close in a second-round game when Emmaus (27-4), the District 11 runner-up, jumped out to a 21-14 lead at the break and then held the Falcons, the fifth-seed from District 3, to seven third-quarter points.
Senior guard Allison Smith, a Niagara University recruit, scored 13 points for Cedar Crest (28-5), and finished her career with 1,137 points – sixth-most in school history.
JEFFREY REINHART
