Hayley Fiedler and the CMS 7th graders pounded on Stevens Thursday, running their record to 6-1. (Photo by JohnsPhotos.net)
Farewell, Captain Ponytail, you won’t be missed.
Stevens Middle School basketball, and its passive-aggressive coach, who never met an early exit he couldn’t ankle to, made their final visit to Coupeville’s gym Thursday.
As befits a momentous moment such as this, the day had everything, from an electrifying win by the Wolf 7th graders to an 8th grade game which ended in confusion way, way earlier than was necessary.
There will be many positives about Coupeville’s move from the Olympic League to the new North Sound Conference this fall.
The greatest of them all, though, will probably be this — no more Stevens, no how, no way.
8th grade:
Stevens is a ginormous middle school which feeds mega-sized 2A Port Angeles, and their older hoops squad is essentially an AAU team transported to the world of middle school sports.
So, the fact the visitors grabbed a 28-9 win in a game which lasted for essentially two-and-a-half quarters is not a surprise.
While the loss dropped CMS to 4-3 on the season, the Wolves got stronger as the game played out.
Down 17-0 at one point, the Wolves finally broke through when Anya Leavell banged down low for a hard-earned bucket.
With Coupeville switching from a zone to a man defense, it played Stevens essentially even in the second half of the game.
Leavell, channeling the red-hot Damian Lillard, added a three-point bomb from the right side, Kylie Van Velkinburgh knocked down a bank shot and the visitors scored on the wrong basket to round out the scoring.
Ja’Kenya Hoskins, who was hit hard on almost every play, was a one-woman wrecking crew, braids swinging madly as she fought on the boards and the floor.
Matching her teammate’s intensity and passion, Kiara Contreras, while shielded from the ref’s view, dropped a wicked, WWE-approved elbow on a pushy rival.
The game got weird, in a totally expected way, when Stevens coach pulled his favorite move for the 275th time.
Insisting he and his team had to catch the 6:00 ferry off The Rock, and would die if they had to wait until the 7:30 or 9:10 sailings, Captain Ponytail talked the refs into abandoning the normal second-half set-up of two eight-minute quarters.
In their place, the teams played a 10-minute second half with a running clock.
And I do mean a running clock…
It properly lurched to a stop when Coupeville called a solitary 30-second timeout, but that lasted all of 1.4 seconds, thanks to the mumbly badgering of the refs by the Stevens coach.
Cause, you know, when you’re traveling 3.5 miles on a wide-open road on a sleepy Thursday, to catch a ferry you have a reservation for, leaving at 5:27 PM instead of 5:30 PM makes all the difference…
But, it was kind of perfect.
Coupeville, which almost always catches the final ferry home from EVERY road trip, being stiffed one last time by a school which always acts as if it’s doing us a grand favor even playing “the hicks from the sticks.”
I’d tell them not to let the door hit them where the good lord split them, but … yeah, I know … they left 20 minutes ago.
7th grade:
This, instead, is how the Wolf faithful will remember Stevens — getting their fannies kicked, good and solidly.
Coupeville’s young guns, a scrappy, ball-hawking bunch who take no guff from no one, scorched the visitors 36-21 to sweep the season series and improve to 6-1.
The Wolves get a chance to avenge that one loss this Monday, Mar. 19, when Sequim arrives on Whidbey for a rematch.
Facing off with an aggressive Stevens squad, CMS refused to back down, seizing the lead midway through the first quarter and never relinquishing it.
Maddie Georges slipped a pair of free throws through the net — a small segment of the 10 charity shots she nailed during the game — to lift the Wolves to a 5-4 lead.
Moments later Gwen Gustafson stopped ‘n popped on a short runner, then Alita Blouin sent the Wolf fans through the roof.
Snagging an in-bounds pass and evading her defender in one smooth move, “The Assassin” hit nothing but the bottom of the net on a buzzer-beater, with the ball dropping through the twines as the alarm blared and her fan club went bonkers.
Up 9-4 after one, Coupeville used runs at the end of both the second and third quarters to blunt any hopes Stevens had of mounting a comeback.
Despite going nearly 10 minutes without hitting a field goal — a dry period which covered most of the second quarter and a hunk of the third — the Wolves never lost the lead.
With Georges nailing free throws and Coupeville’s defense clamping down big-time, CMS was still up 16-14 when the Wolves found their game-closing spark.
The subsequent 17-5 run, which stretched the lead to 14 points at the end of the third, was capped when Gustafson beat the clock, slid between two defenders and drained a buzzer-beater of her own on a short jumper in the paint.
The one girl who might have stopped Gustafson is still counting her teeth, after she ran into a note-perfect screen from Georges, who skidded to a halt, braced herself, and absorbed the blow.
The collision launched the Stevens defender off her feet and carried her halfway across the gym, rattled windows in homes two miles away, and anointed Georges, a slick-dribbling dynamo, with a new nickname, at least for one afternoon.
Say hello to “The Wall.”
The young woman usually referred to as “Mad Dog” paced CMS with a game-high 12, while Blouin banked in 11, Gustafson scorched the nets for six and Carolyn Lhamon knocked down four.
Allie Lucero dropped in a bucket on a nice turnaround shot in the paint, while Nezi Keiper sank a free throw to round out the scoring.
Keiper also had a nifty steal and feed to Gustafson during the game-busting run, while Jessenia Camarena raced back on defense late in the game, then elevated and spiked a Stevens shot into the cheap seats for a beautiful block.
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