PARIS — Oxford Hills and Cheverus are both struggling with the flu bug right now. Only adding to their fatigue on Wednesday was a quick turnaround for both teams, which were coming off of road victories the night before.
The Vikings sensed that the Stags were running on fumes and turned up the defensive pressure to dominate the second half in a 62-27 victory on Senior Night.
Maighread Laliberte led all scorers with 17 points for the Vikings (13-3), while Maggie Hartnett and Julia Colby chipped in with nine points apiece and Cecelia Dietrich added eight points. Abby Cavallaro led the Stags (9-6) with nine points while Lauren Jordan added six points.
Leading 32-18 at intermission, Oxford Hills used full-court pressure to hold Cheverus to nine points in the second half.
“We played pretty good defense in the first half, but at halftime we were talking about how to step up our game and we decided to start pressing,” Hartnett said. “When we press, that usually works pretty good for our team, because that sets the other people off.”
“I think our girls brought the energy when we came out in the third quarter and I think it turned the game for us,” said Oxford Hills assistant coach Matt Corbett, who said head coach Nate Pelletier addressed the team at its shootaround earlier in the day and hopes to be back on the bench soon. “I think we just amped up the energy and we rode that all the way through.”
Pelletier is also out battling an illness.
Not only did the Vikings make the Stags work hard for what little offense they had, but they always limited them to one shot when they missed, not allowing a single offensive rebound and finishing the game with a 29-15 overall advantage on the boards. Bailey Whitney led the way with seven rebounds.
“We told them Cheverus has two, three and even four girls at times that are crashing the boards really hard, and we told them that’s something you’re going to have to win to win the game,” Corbett said.
“We tried to focus on boxing out and rebounds so they could only get one shot, and it worked,” Hartnett said.
Cheverus didn’t score its first, and as it turned out only, hoop of the third quarter until Kat Kane’s bucket with 3:28 left in the period. By then, the Vikings were on the verge of pushing their lead past the 20-point mark thanks to back-to-back hoops by Colby, a 3-pointer and a layup off of a stolen outlet pass.
By the end of the quarter, the Vikings held a comfortable 45-22 lead.
“We are lost,” Cheverus coach Gary Fifield said. “We’re just not executing. We’ve got so much game slippage. We’ve been sick for two weeks, just like Nate’s sick, and we’ve just lost all intensity. They played some good ‘D,’ and we’re just not executing.”
Hartnett credited the big Senior Night crowd with helping to give the Vikings the extra boost they needed.
“I think the energy was higher (than a typical home game),” he said. “We took the big crowd that we had and the energy from the bench and that helped us pull it all together.”
Laliberte gave Oxford Hills a lead it wouldn’t relinquish with a 3-pointer with 2:52 left in the first quarter. A traditional three-point play by Laliberte put the margin into double digits at 25-15 midway through the second quarter.
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