Watseka-Milford finishes strong to win regional championship

WATSEKA − The Watseka-Milford girls basketball team did not trail in Thursday’s championship game of the Class 2A Watseka Regional, although it came close late in the game.

Hoopeston cut the Warriors' lead to 36-35 with just over two minutes to go, the closest it had been since Watseka-Milford led 2-1. But the Warriors quickly gathered themselves, went on a 7-0 run to close the game, and won the regional title for the fourth season in a row.

Watseka, in the first season of its co-op with Milford, improved to 27-4 overall on the season with the 43-35 victory, reaching 27 wins for the second straight season.

That 27th win did not come easy, though. The Warriors carried a 10-point lead into halftime, but coach Barry Bauer said the team was prepared for Hoopeston to push hard in the second half. When the Cornjerkers did just that, and cut the Warriors' lead to one point late, he said he loved how the team responded.

“We kept telling them the whole second half that it was going to be about poise,” Bauer said. “We had a really good first half, we got [Hoopeston] down, so we knew they were going to come out a little more intense and with more physicality. We wanted to show poise, and I think we did. The last two minutes, I think we really took care of the ball and we did exactly what we wanted to do to finish that off.”

Watseka-Milford had built up a 36-25 lead late in the third quarter before the Cornjerkers bridged the third and fourth with a 10-0 run. The Warriors managed to stop the bleeding with 1:24 to go when Thayren Rigsby converted a huge three-point play to go back up 39-35 and break the team’s scoring drought.

Megan Martin followed with a minute to go, scoring the final two of her game-high 20 points, and a pair of free throws from Noelle Schroeder with 28 seconds to go all but eliminated any chance of a Cornjerkers comeback.

Martin, who added a team-high 16 rebounds to go with her 20 points, said the team has been preparing for the kind of late-game situations they found themselves in Thursday, and that work paid off.

“Coach Bauer and our team have been working in practice day in and day out focusing on end-of-game play, and just really focusing on composure is our big takeaway from practice into games,” she said.

Schroeder finished with eight points. She knocked down a pair of 3-pointers in the first half to precede her late free throws. Lauren Tegtmeyer had six points to go with a dozen rebounds.

Tegtmeyer and Martin are the only seniors on the roster for Watseka-Milford, and both have been with the Warriors for all four regional titles.

“I just told the seniors how proud I was, because that senior group is the first group that’s won four, and it’s just Megan and Lauren,” he said. “It’s not possible to break that record.”

Martin said that the pride of being a part of four regional-championship teams is something she will carry with her into the future.

“I think what’s going to matter most is coming back to the gym 20 years from now and seeing those regional titles on the wall, and being proud that I did it with some of my best friends,” she said. “Being a part of this great program, it’s a really good feeling.”

Watseka-Milford will now head into semifinals of the Herscher Sectional Feb. 25 to face a seventh-seeded Reed-Custer team that beat top seed Coal City in the regional semis before downing Joliet Catholic in the title game Thursday.