Madeline Strasburg was the only Wolf to consistently hit her free throws Friday, as an 11-of-29 performance at the charity stripe cost CHS a win. (John Fisken photo)
It’s official.
And while it didn’t happen exactly the way the Coupeville High School girls’ basketball team would have wanted — with a win over 2A Sultan at home Friday night — it did, eventually, happen.
The Wolves are playoff bound.
A hail of fourth-quarter three-point bombs from the Turks, and 18 missed free throws by the Wolves, cost Coupeville, as a fast start trickled away in a gut-wrenching 42-39 loss.
But, the defeat, which dropped the Wolves to 8-9 overall, 4-7 in Cascade Conference play, was softened by the news South Whidbey fell 47-31 to visiting Lakewood.
The Falcons dropped to 1-10 in league play, leaving Coupeville three games up with three to play in the race for the #2 seed from their league heading into the 1A district playoffs.
Since the Wolves swept South Whidbey and own the tie-breaker, game over, man, game over.
Coupeville will host the #3 seed from the Northwest Conference (currently Mount Baker) Tuesday, Feb. 11 in the opener of the double-elimination tourney.
Four of the eight teams playing (King’s is the #1 seed from the Cascade Conference, while the NWC sends six teams) will advance to Tri-Districts.
With the postseason locked into place, the Wolves can use their final three regular season games (they travel to ATM Feb. 4, host Granite Falls for Senior Night Feb. 7 and travel to King’s Feb. 8) to fine-tune their game and correct mistakes.
Nothing looms larger right now than the team-wide inability to hit a shot from the charity stripe.
Friday night, Coupeville and Sultan each made 11 free throws. But, since Sultan is a very “hands-on” team and tends to get called for its fair share of fouls, the Wolves had 29 attempts to Sultan’s 17.
Coupeville missed its first seven free throws before Breeanna Messner slid one through the hoop, and only one player, Madeline Strasburg, was able to hit two free throws in one trip to the stripe. She did it twice, draining five of Coupeville’s 11 successful free throws.
In a back-and-forth, hard-fought affair where the Wolves led in the fourth quarter, his team’s inability to convert its freebies haunted CHS coach David King after the game.
“I told the girls, we make four of those free throws, four, and we win this game,” King said. “We have to get better at this.”
Coupeville opened the game on a tear, even while clanging its free-throws, bolting out to an 8-1 lead with four different players scoring.
Messner banked home the game’s first basket on a shot that lingered on the rim for a day and a half before flopping through the net, then Strasburg, Makana Stone and Julia Myers all knocked home quick buckets.
Sultan fought its way back into the game, but Amanda Fabrizi staked the Wolves to an 11-10 lead with a dazzling driving layin.
The senior guard, who later took a nasty poke to the head that should leave her with a black eye Saturday morning, roared into the paint with her body twisted to protect the ball from a defender, only to throw down a sweeping hook off the glass at the last second.
The Wolves made several attempts to pull away in the second and third, getting the lead up to six, only to have the plucky Turks whittle the score back down.
A Sultan team that hadn’t hit a three all game got hot from behind the arc in the fourth, raining down three daggers straight into the heart of Wolf Nation.
Suddenly down by five, it was Coupeville’s turn to rally, with a 5-2 run pulling them within 39-37.
Unfortunately, the one Turk basket was as big a heart-breaker as possible, as a Sultan player picked up a loose ball, after Stone had soundly rejected her teammate’s shot, and drained a short jumper with one tick on the shot clock.
After the refs kept things interesting by calling back-to-back traveling violations — one on each team — Sultan drained three of its final four free throws, packaged around a missed field goal from Coupeville, to seal the come-from-behind win.
Stone banked in a rebound (one of about a million that she snagged) with a second to play to cap her team-high 10 point performance, but the clock ran out before Sultan in-bounded the ball, preventing the Wolves from fouling again.
Strasburg banged home nine in support of Stone, while Fabrizi netted six before taking a shot to the face in the fourth quarter. Kacie Kiel (5), Myers (4), Messner (4) and McKayla Bailey (1) rounded out the scorers.
Monica Vidoni and Wynter Thorne also saw court time for CHS, with Vidoni getting a big roar from the crowd when she grabbed a defensive rebound, then wrenched it free with conviction when a pesky Turk tried to take it away from her.
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