Wheeling Park’s Karringtyn Miller looks for a pass along the baseline during the Patriots’ home game Tuesday against the University Hawks. Miller scored 11 points in a 60-45 loss to the Hawks.
WHEELING – The University Hawks braved the trip through the snow up to the Palace on the Hill for an important OVAC 5A matchup with the Wheeling Park Patriots on Tuesday, and emerged back out to the frosty evening with a 60-45 road victory.
University, who moves to 6-3 on the season with the win, received double-digit scoring efforts from Brianna Fox (19), Julia Maisel (18), and Hannah Stemple (12), but the scoring was slow to start Tuesday, with the first basket coming nearly seven minutes into the first quarter, a banked-in two-point jumper from Stemple breaking thawing the scoring.
University led 10-7 after the first quarter. The Hawks shot 5-11 in the frame, while Wheeling Park shot 2-16.
Fox provided a spark at the end of the quarter, flipping in a layup at the buzzer. The score carried into a strong second quarter, Cox scoring nine points and Maisel scoring 13 in the quarter.
Fox made it two buzzer-beaters in a row with a corner 3-pointer to send the contest into the halftime break.
“I liked how we shared the basketball,” University head coach Nick Lusk said. “I thought defensively we did a nice job, and we rebounded. That’s what we stressed at the beginning of the game- defense, rebounding and sharing the ball. We’ve been doing that the last few games and it’s been pretty good for us.”
“They’re all playing well,” Lusk said of his squad. “Our five starters, this is the most experienced team that I’ve had. These girls have been together, these five starters have played together, they know what I expect and what each other expects. We’re just playing well right now.”
University shot 54 percent in the first half, while Wheeling Park shot 23 percent. In many other categories- rebounds, turnovers, assists- the two teams were neck-and-neck over that stretch, but Patriots head coach Ryan Young looked beyond the stat sheet to assess his team’s performance.
“You could blame the game on poor shooting but the difference was that University flat-out played harder than us from the beginning of the game,” Young said. “We had a really difficult time finding them in transition, we had a really hard time staying in front of them defensively. We’re going to see these defenses all year and we can’t let a slow start offensively dictate how we play defensively.
“Consistently this year we have defended teams and we have rebounded. That wasn’t the case tonight. I thought University deserved a lot of credit for how they came out, this is a good basketball team and this was a big game for seeding purposes. They kind of took it to us.”
The lead grew to as much as 25 in the third quarter, but Park cut into the deficit in the fourth, getting as close as a dozen.
The Patriots’ Alexis Bordas led all scorers with 24 points. Karringtyn Miller joined her in double figures with 11.
Bordas added four rebounds and four steals to her stat line.
“I’d say we did pretty well on her,” Lusk said of Bordas, the two-time state Player of the Year. “We wanted to make sure we took her away and made her uncomfortable, and we kind of did that. She’s going to get her’s, she’s so good, she’s the best player in the state. She’s going to get her points but I thought we did a nice job of containing her and making her shots tough.”
Maggie Hupp had nine rebounds for Park.
University finished the game going 12-19 from the foul line. Wheeling Park was 1-4.
Wheeling Park falls to 7-3 after Tuesday. Going into the game, the OVAC website had Wheeling Park atop the 5A girls basketball standings, with University in third.
UP NEXT
Wheeling Park is at home against Buckhannon Upshur on Jan. 18. University travels to face John Marshall on Jan. 16.
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