Wilmington rebounds with key ICE win over Herscher

WILMINGTON – As the Wilmington girls basketball team looked to recover from its loss to Illinois Central Eight Conference co-leader Manteno last Thursday, the Wildcats knew that if they wanted to stay within striking distance for the conference crown, they’d have to bounce back and defeat a sturdy Herscher team that came to town Monday night.

The Tigers took a narrow halftime lead and started finding some breathing room early in the second half, but the Wildcats put together a 12-2 run to end the third quarter and regained the lead, holding off a late Tigers push of their own in a 44-37 Wilmington win.

The Wildcats earned their first win against the Tigers this year in the third meeting between the two teams, improving to 18-5 and 7-3 in the ICE, two games behind Manteno and Coal City. The Tigers slid to 11-10 (5-4).

“We’ve had games this year where we’ve been in that exact situation,” Wildcats head coach Eric Dillon said. “When we played Coal City early on, a couple games at our Christmas tournament early on, where we had games that were tight and they just battled through. Tonight they were just leaning on their experience and saying, ‘hey, there’s no need to panic.’

“When we went to the locker room [at halftime], I saw no panic,” he said. “I saw girls offering up things they’ve seen, offering up ideas to help us improve, and that was the biggest thing.”

A back-and-forth first half saw four ties and nine lead changes, the last of them when Pippa Dunnill’s 3-pointer put the Tigers ahead 16-13 with three minutes left in the second quarter. The Tigers took a 19-15 lead to the locker room, and after Dunnill’s quick bucket 12 seconds into the half, the game became the epitome of a defensive struggle.

After a two-and-a-half minute combined scoreless stretch, the Wildcats broke the ice when Nicole Quigley’s layup cut the Wilmington deficit to 21-17 with 5:15 in the third, the kickstart of that 12-2 run as the Wildcats held Herscher to just four points in the third quarter.

“There’s five girls on the floor, and we made sure to use all five girls and our strengths, and we picked each other up,” Wildcats senior guard/forward Skylar Rossow-Knight said of the Wildcats' push.

Whether it was on the offensive end, where her 11 points were second on the night to Sami Liaromatis, or defensively, where she spent time guarding all five positions at different points, Dillon said Rossow-Knight’s leadership by example helped give them the spark they needed.

“When she’s playing like that, it instills that mentality, and she leads by example,” Dillon said. “She’s very smart, too, and she sees what’s going on and does a nice job communicating that. Just like Sami, sometimes I can’t take them on the floor. They’re just playing well at both ends of the floor, not making mistakes. They just go play and have fun.”

The Tigers were able to make one last charge as sophomore guard Maia Haubner exploded for seven of her team-high 12 points in a fourth quarter that saw the Wilmington lead shrink to 31-30 with three minutes left. But the Wildcats got a bucket from Rossow-Knight with 2:25 on the clock that was followed by a pair of Nina Egizio free throws and a momentous and-one from Liaromatis that pushed the lead back to 38-30 with 1:34 on the clock.

Liaromatis had a game-high 14 points for the Wildcats, followed by 11 from Rossow-Knight and eight from Taylor Stefancic. As a team, Wilmington was 20 for 32 from the free-throw line.

The Tigers got 12 from Haubner, followed by nine from Dunnill and six from Anistin Hackley, all of which came in the first half.