AUGUSTA — The Richmond Bobcats are very comfortable on the Augusta Civic Center floor.
“We consider this our second home,” senior forward Ciarra Lancaster said. “We’ve been here so much, we feel like it’s natural for us.”
Success has come naturally for the Bobcats in the building. That doesn’t mean it’s been easy. Or that it’s always been a beautiful thing to behold.
Winning back-to-back Western D titles will breed confidence, however. And that might be the biggest reason why the Bobcats were celebrating their third consecutive championship with a 48-36 win Saturday and top-seeded Rangeley was, for the second year in a row, left to wonder why seemingly everything went wrong at the worst possible time.
“It was kind of strange coming into the tournament,” Richmond coach Molly Bishop said. “I’ve got four freshmen. Usually those kids are shaking in their boots before they come up here to play. We came up here and played over Christmas break and the senior leadership had those kids calmed right down and they weren’t nervous.”
Having seven seniors, including an all-senior starting five, helps keep the butterflies to a minimum. Not that that always translates into good decision-making for the full 32 minutes of a high school basketball game.
The Bobcats started out Saturday with good shots but poor aim. Six offensive rebounds in the first five minutes gave them plenty of extra rounds to find the range and a 16-4 lead.
The poor shooting carried over into the second quarter. The rebounding didn’t, and they saw that lead dwindle to two by halftime, thanks in part to some over-anxiousness on defense that sent the Lakers to the free-throw line frequently and helped make up for a paltry four field goals in the entire first half.
Richmond’s excitability crept over to the other end of the floor in the third quarter. The Bobcats started rushing shots. But again, with Lancaster (five offensive rebounds) and Jamie Plummer (seven offensive rebounds) crashing the glass for second chances, they were able to keep the Lakers at arm’s length before the senior duo took over the final 10 minutes of the game.
“We wanted to limit them to one bad shot, and I feel like we did that in the second quarter. That’s what allowed us to stay in it,” Rangeley coach Heidi Deery said. “As the game started to get away, we didn’t do that at all.”
They also didn’t get to the free throw line enough to make up for a game-long shooting slump.
“Offensively, we had some people who usually perform for us and they didn’t,” Deery said. “They’re young, but still, we needed some offense out of those people and we didn’t get it. To keep it close, if you’re going to give up those easy baskets and putbacks, we’ve got to answer on the other end and we didn’t.”
“I just wanted to hang around long enough that they started questioning themselves,” Deery said.
Deep down, Deery knew if anyone would start questioning themselves, it was more likely to be her young team. The Lakers got to that point in the fourth quarter, when Plummer, whom they held in check through the first three quarters, went off for 11 of the Bobcats’ 17 points in the period and put them away.
“We knew this was our last go-around for seven of us, our last game here, so we just wanted to go out with a bang,” said Plummer, who had 16 rebounds to go with her 15 points and was named the outstanding player of the tournament for the second year in a row.
The Bobcats will be out of their comfort zone next week. They’ll be in Bangor trying to avenge state championship losses the last two years to Washburn, which has just one senior but a whole lotta firepower.
The Lakers will begin the long journey back to Augusta knowing they will lose two seniors, sisters Jenney and Abby Abbott, and yet still have so much left to learn.
The returning talent virtually suggests they will have several chances to apply whatever knowledge they acquired Saturday and over the next 12 months to the ACC floor again. What they do with it is up to them. If they follow Richmond’s lead, they will start to think of Augusta as their home away from home.
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