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SYRACUSE -ÊSteve Neff was already worried, and seeing the shoes only ratcheted the tension up another notch.
"Carol Duncan forgot her shoes tonight," the NorthWood girls basketball coach said. "I don't know if you noticed, but she had her volleyball shoes on during the basketball game. How focused can you be if you forget your shoes?"
His worries were well-founded.
His NorthWood Panthers, the defending 3A state champions, frittered away a 20-6 lead and lost their first-round sectional game to Wawasee 48-44 in Friday's Wawasee 3A Sectional game. NorthWood ends the season 16-5; Wawasee, 14-7, meets 20-4 Angola in tonight's Wawasee Sectional championship at 7:30. NorthWood failed to win a sectional championship for the first time since 1992.
Sophomore forward Shanna Zolman, the state's leading scorer with 33.5 points per game, scored 28 on 9-of-19 shooting from the field and 9-of-9 shooting from the free throw line. Freshman forward Meagan Wallen, who scored six key points in the second quarter, added 12 on 6-of-8 shooting. The Warriors beat the defending state champions by playing a lineup with only freshmen and sophomores.
NorthWood's top three scorers, Duncan (13.4), Andee Morris (12.4) and Kasey Chamberlin (10.7), combined for 14 on 5-of-23 shooting. Senior forward Shelly Stichter, who averaged 4.4 points per game, led NorthWood with 17 points and 10 rebounds.
The game's heroine could not be seen after the buzzer, as Zolman was on the bottom of a pile of celebrating fans mobbing the floor as if the state title itself had been won, not a second-round sectional game.
A concerned Jim Schmidt, Wawasee's well-built assistant coach, sprinted toward the pile and began tossing bodies aside to keep players from getting injured.
"Yeah, I was on the bottom," Zolman said. "My head was smacking on the court, but it was worth it after this win."
For years Wawasee was to NorthWood what the Washington Generals were to the Harlem Globetrotters: the Globetrotters won all the time, and so did NorthWood. Last year NorthWood thumped Wawasee 76-38 in the Wawasee Sectional, and when they met this season, NorthWood won 61-48 at Wawasee.
The domination ended Friday when early it looked like NorthWood would run Wawasee out of the gym.
NorthWood shredded Wawasee's zone defense by hitting 9 of 13 shots in the first quarter to take a 20-6 lead. The Panthers spread the floor and got open looks for easy shots.
"I was worried because they had jumped us like that before," Wawasee coach Kem Zolman said. "All week my biggest concern was letting them jump out to a big lead. For whatever reason, things turned around for us."
They turned around after the Wawasee coach made a change. He went to a man-to-man defense. NorthWood was never the same. After hitting nine field goals and scoring 20 points in the first quarter, the Panthers hit 9 of 30 field goals and scored but 24 points the rest of the game. Zolman outscored the Panthers by herself in the final three quarters as she tallied 26.
"We had a couple of defensive sets we wanted to try," Kem Zolman said. "The first one didn't work, but Plan B worked OK. The zone wasn't working. NorthWood's zone offense picks you apart."
Offensively, Zolman and Wallen took over. Wawasee outscored NorthWood 19-10 in the second quarter, and Wallen and Zolman scored all 19. Wallen's basket with 3:43 left in the second quarter cut the lead to 26-17, the first time it was in single digits since the first quarter.
"We've talked all year about needing that second person to complement Shanna," Kem Zolman said. "Tonight, Meagan Wallen came through big-time. She did a great job just to get some points on the board for us."
After seeing Wawasee cut its 20-6 first-quarter lead to 30-25 at halftime, the Panthers were never the same. Previously unflappable, the Panthers started showing their frustration on the court as they missed shots and threw the ball away. They hit 5 of 14 free throws in the game.
"They had a great game plan," Neff said. "They took Morris away. Then Kasey and Katie had bad nights. If they would have had good nights, it would have been a whole different story. They doubled Carroll, which frustrated her."
Wawasee claimed its first lead in the third quarter when Zolman drove through the paint, ducked a defender, drew a foul and hit the shot. The field goal and free throw put Wawasee up 34-32. The Warriors settled on a 36-35 third-quarter lead then never fell behind again.
"I thought the second quarter was a big factor," Neff said. "We lost our composure and never got it back. We took shots we don't normally take, we stopped reversing the ball. Basically, we stopped moving on offense."
The Warriors ended the whispers that NorthWood had crawled inside their heads. They ended the NorthWood "stigma," as Kem Zolman put it after last year's 76-38 sectional loss.
"Our JV team ended that when they beat NorthWood (41-35) in the tourney in January," Kem Zolman said. " I don't give a rip if it was our freshman team or our junior varsity team. When your school continually gets thumped by a school, you need someone to come along and knock them off. Our JV team did that for us.
Asked when Wawasee's varsity team last beat the Panthers, Kem Zolman said, "It's been a long time."
Last year the going line was in two years the Warriors would be ready for a run. They upped the timetable by a year, to Kem Zolman's surprise.
"Wednesday, I thought it would take divine intervention to beat NorthWood," he said. "Thursday, we had a great practice. I thought if we could give that effort this game, we might have a chance."
Said Neff: "I had a bad feeling about this game. The first time around we played them early in December, and Zolman was trying to get her team together. She dealt the ball off a lot then to get her teammates going. Tonight, there was no tomorrow. Dad or no dad, if I'm the coach and I have Shanna on my team, I'm gonna let her take it every time. I was worried about her taking the game over like she did."
WAWASEE 48
NORTHWOOD 44
NorthWood (16-5) 20 10 5 9 - 44
Wawasee (14-7) 6 19 11 12 - 48
Wawasee FG FT R A S Pts.
Zolman (F) 9-19 9-9 4 2 5 28
Wallen (F) 6-8 0-0 2 2 5 12
Leach (C) 2-4 2-2 1 1 6 6
Krull (G) 1-1 0-1 3 1 3 2
Fawley (G) 0-2 0-0 1 0 2 0
Henderson 0-2 0-0 0 0 1 0
Higginbotham 0-1 0-0 0 0 0 0
Totals 18-37 11-12 11 6 22 48
NorthWood FG FT A S R Pts.
Stichter (F) 8-11 1-2 3 0 10 17
Ke. Chamberlin (F) 3-6 2-4 2 0 5 8
Duncan (C) 3-12 1-6 3 0 9 7
Ky. Chamberlin (G) 1-8 1-2 3 3 2 4
Morris (G) 1-3 0-0 2 1 2 3
Haney 2-3 0-0 0 0 0 5
Totals 18-43 5-14 13 4 28 44
Three-point goals - NorthWood 3-5 (Morris 1-2, Haney 1-2, Ky. Chamberlin 1-1), Wawasee 1-6 (Zolman 1-5, Henderson 0-1). Turnovers - Wawasee 12, NorthWood 12. Fouled out -Ênone. Total fouls - NorthWood 14, Wawasee 12.
Other Wawasee Sectional score:
ANGOLA 69, WEST NOBLE 55
Angola (20-4) - Gainey 16, Seevers 12, Fultz 11, Leininger 9, Shoup 8, Grant 8, Miller 3, Dunham 2
West Noble (15-8) -ÊByers 16, Ramey 15, Gangwer 10, McFarren 10, Kavanaugh 4
