OTTAWA — For three quarters, Shawnee’s Grace Freiberger had been held scoreless by Ottawa-Glandorf but in the final eight minutes, the Indians sophomore recorded 14 points to help spark Shawnee to a 40-38 win over the Titans in a key Western Buckeye League clash Sunday.
With the win, Shawnee (19-1, 7-1) puts itself in position to share the WBL title with O-G (13-7, 7-1) with a game left for each team in the league. The Indians take on Kenton and the Titans face Defiance Thursday.
“Grace made some really big shots for us tonight,” Shawnee head coach Rachel Rumbaugh said. “I couldn’t have asked for our girls to play any harder than what they did. We had a game plan and we stuck to it. I am not only proud of how we played the game but how we finished that fourth quarter.
“We knew it was going to be a close game going into it and that is how we prepared. We still have Kenton on Thursday and we take it one game at a time but this was a huge win for us. These girls played their heart’s out.
Filling in for Troy Yant, interim head coach Scott Maag said his team battled back but came up short.
‘We are proud of girls and we didn’t quit,” Maag said. “We were dead with a minute to go and we still battled back. We got a big steal by Katie (Kaufman) and the and one right there to get us within two and I thought we had a shot. We had our out of bounds play that we put in all week and we had it with Erin (Kaufman) with a one-on-one situation and we said in the locker room sometimes it just isn’t your day. We had open looks and it just didn’t go in.”
The score was knotted at 24-24 going into the fourth period in a game dominated by defense. Up to that point, Zoe Best had scored all but two of the Indians buckets.
But in at the onset of the final stanza, Freiberger found her shot and it spearheaded an 11-3 run to open the quarter and give Shawnee a 33-27 lead with 3;30 left in the game. The Titans whittled the lead to 35-32 with a little over a minute left when Chloe Schroeder hit a 3-pointer. However, Freiberger answered with a 3-pointer of her own to give the Indians the six-point advantage with less than a minute to play.
Most teams might have folded at this point, but the Titans, thanks to a another Schroeder trey, battled back to slice the lead to two, 40-38 with 6.2 seconds left in the game after a steal and a three-point play by Katie Kaufman. On the in bounds, Shawnee launched a pass at the mid-court line, but the Indians were whistled for an over and back violation giving O-G one last shot.
But that shot never came as the Titans tried to work the ball in but threw an errand pass and Shawnee secured the ball for the win.
Best, who carried the Indians offensively for the first three quarters, finished with 22 points on the night.
“We were trying to attack the basket and Grace did a really good job picking up where Zoe left off and it was a great team effort,” Rumbaugh said.
O-G’s Erin Kaufman was the Titans’ primary offensive weapon as she scored 19 points and grabbed nine rebounds. Going into the fourth quarter she had all but seven of O-G’s points.
Shawnee’s zone defense was instrumental in keeping the Titans’ offense in check. Even though Erin Kaufman led her team in points, O-G struggled to score all night. In the fourth quarter, made four baskets from the field and three free throws.
“They were playing a two-three zone and they were packing it in on the right side and jumping on our reverse pass,” Maag said. ‘Then when we got the ball inside they sent three people at our post players and in the second half they made some good adjustments and we didn’t make the adjustments necessarily.”
“We definitely wanted to pack it inside and make them shoot from the outside and the girls did a great job of that,” Rumbaugh said.
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