Plainfield North girls cruise past Plainfield Central, boys pull away late for Tuesday night sweep

PLAINFIELD – When two rivals meet up, you can never be sure what will happen, no matter what the respective records may look like. It could go how you think, or one team could flip the script.

Or what happened Tuesday night at Plainfield Central High School could happen: a bit of both.

Plainfield Central hosted Plainfield North for a boy-girls Southwest Prairie Conference basketball doubleheader. In the girls game, things went about as expected with the visiting Tigers dominating for a 68-20 victory. The boys game was expected to go a similar route, but instead was a back-and-forth thriller until the fourth quarter when the Tigers pulled away for a 61-52 win.

First, the girls game. Things actually started evenly with the two teams trading baskets, leading to seven early lead changes. After that, however, with Plainfield Central up 7-6, Plainfield North’s Sydney Scott hit a layup to trigger a 12-3 run to close the quarter and take an 18-10 edge.

The run became 15-3 before a jumper by Maeve Carlton cut it to 21-12. It was all Tigers after that, however, as Scott and Taylor Henderson led North to a 34-14 halftime edge.

It didn’t change in the third as it took the Wildcats five minutes to score their first points of the second half. Henderson made it a 30-point game with 1:40 left in the period, and the lead reached 54-20 to trigger a running clock in the fourth.

“I think we really focused in on our press and putting pressure on the ball [late in the first],” Scott said. “I think our 1-2-2 is pretty unbreakable when we’ve got a lot of ball pressure up top, so we just focused in on it.”

Henderson led the way with 15 points, Scott added 14, and Kaitlyn Sedillo chipped in 11. It was a complete effort as Isabella Koldoff contributed nine and Anaya Peterson had eight. That’s the kind of depth the Tigers (17-6, 6-3 SPC) hope to see more of moving forward.

“Togetherness is key,” assistant coach Troynell Adams said. “Keeping things together and sticking to the game plan. When we do that, we’re something to see. It’s when we start to come apart that we start to fall. We just have to trust each other when we’re out there on the floor.”

The Wildcats (2-19, 0-8) were led by Carlton and Mia White, who finished with six points each. They didn’t hang their heads, though, as coach Tim Torkelson commended his team’s fight throughout the evening.

“We’re going to play hard the whole game all the way through,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what’s on the scoreboard. I compliment my girls over and over that they play hard, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do.”

The boys game was expected to go a similar route. After Tuesday’s result, the Tigers sit at 12-9 overall and 6-5 in the SPC, while the Wildcats are 1-22 and 1-11.

But for the first 24 minutes, it looked like it genuinely could go either way. North needed late shots to take leads at the end of the first and second quarters, and the game was tied entering the fourth. It required a 10-2 run to start the fourth for the Tigers to gain some distance and close out the victory.

“We knew this was a rivalry game and we always have a target on our backs,” Tigers junior Sam Finn said. “That’s Plainfield North. We just want to go out and play harder each quarter. We always play stronger second halves, and we continue to push through games every time.”

Finn finished with 16 points, just behind Quintin Wiencek’s 21 and just ahead of Pierre Pointer’s 13.

Credit the Wildcats' relentless fight. The Tigers actually pulled ahead by 10 early in the third quarter, usually when a team would fold. That’s especially true for a team with only one win on the season, but it wasn’t true for the Wildcats as they plowed forward on an 11-0 run to move ahead 42-41.

Even when Darin Ashiru’s layup seemed to make it three consecutive quarters Plainfield North pulled ahead later, Jayden Acuna nailed a buzzer-beater to tie the game at 46-46.

Acuna led the way with 16 points, while Zion Finch had 11 for Plainfield Central.

It was a great challenge for us and we stepped up to the challenge," Plainfield Central coach Tim Boe said. “There were a couple of simple execution things, and that’s on me as a coach, but our team brought it tonight, our fans created a great atmosphere, and our kids stepped up to the plate and played well.”