First Posted: 2/28/2015
SPENCERVILLE — There are two schools of thought about whether to take a first-round bye or play right away in basketball tournaments.
But taking the first-round bye certainly didn’t seem to be any kind of a problem for Wapakoneta when it rolled to a 57-24 win over St. Marys in a Division II girls basketball sectional championship game at Spencerville High School on Saturday night.
Carly Buzzard scored 18 points to lead Wapakoneta (17-6) and Megan Fisher had 12 points. Erika Angstmann had 12 points for St. Marys (9-14).
The Redskins will now play Wauseon at 6:15 p.m. Thursday in a Division II district semifinal at Paulding High School. Wauseon defeated Celina 64-52 in the other sectional championship game on Saturday at Spencerville.
Wapakoneta will be going for its first district championship since the 2008-2009 team went to the state tournament.
“We’ve been pretty fortunate the last few years not having to play right away so we felt pretty confident going into tonight,” Wapakoneta coach Rusty Allen said. “Actually, sometimes I think the rest does us good. We gave the girls about three days off and let them kind of recover.”
Wapakoneta won 65-35 over St. Marys during the regular season and repeated that performance in the postseason.
“We told the girls to erase that (the first meeting) from their memory. You don’t want to start looking ahead and looking past people. We knew they were going to battle, it was a chance for them to come out and kind of make a statement,” Allen said. “We just did what we needed to do.”
Wapakoneta started fast and St. Marys never really got started.
The Redskins went on a 22-1 run from early in the first quarter to late in the second quarter to almost put the game away by halftime.
St. Marys missed 15 of its first 16 field goal attempts and did not score in the second quarter until Rachel Meier’s lay-up with 1:33 left before halftime.
It didn’t get much better in the second half when Wapakoneta extended its 29-10 halftime lead to as many as 35 points in the game’s final minute.
Wauseon 64, Celina 52
Wauseon got its usual scoring from guard Natalie Koenig (13 points) and Sarah Yackee (9 points), but it also threw a surprise at the Bulldogs.
Maddie Richer, a 5-foot, 3-inch senior guard scored a game-high 19 points and hit five 3-pointers for the Indians (18-5).
“We knew that No. 11 (Koenig) and No. 15 (Yackee) were quick right out of the gate. That’s something we were working on all week – keeping them in front of us. But who knew about No. 3 (Richer)?” Celina coach Toma Hainline said. “All the video we watched she didn’t shoot like that.”
Caelyn Reineke led Celina (7-17) with 11 points.
