Morton High School’s Lady Potters tonight defeated Canton High, 69-44, and I’ll have something to say about that right after having something to say about a thing I’d never seen before.
These five guys came in to Canton’s Alice Ingersoll Gymnasium. They were all dressed in black. One dude wore a gorilla mask. Each of the teenage boys, for of course they were teenage boys, carried a large poster board. Whatever was written on the boards, they didn’t let us see. We saw only the blank side. Clearly, the five guys had mischief in mind, for don’t teenage boys always have mischief in mind?
In a surprise to anyone suspecting the boys had a plan to distract the Lady Potters, the introduction of the visitors’ starting lineup went off without a hitch. The boys sat silent.
But in Canton’s turn, the boys moved to seats across from the Lady Giants’ bench. There they stood with their boards,, still turned blank-side out – until the public address system announcer called out Canton’s fifth starter, “At another guard, sophomore CASSIDY FAWCETT!”
As Cassidy Fawcett ran onto the court, through a gauntlet of her teammates, the five guys turned their boards so they could be read.
And Fawcett saw . . .
“P R O M ?”
So, at halftime, I went to the five guys.
“I’m an old sportswriter,” I said, “but I’d never seen that. Whose idea?”
“Mine,” said Caleb Collier, who is an 18-year-old Canton senior and was not, in case his parents read this, the one in the gorilla mask.
“Good idea,” I said.
“Unique,” he said.
As to Cassidy Fawcett’s response, there was a game to be played first.
Not much of a game. Six weeks ago, Morton crushed Canton, 64-28. The Lady Giants were more competitive this time, but still – the Lady Potters are so much the class of the Mid-Illini Conference, now 13-0 with one league game to play (and 26-2 overall), that with Canton even more competitive the Lady Giants still got crushed, by 25 this time. The Canton coach, Layne Langhoff, shook his head. “Morton is just so disruptive,” he said.
Look, for instance, at the way Morton disrupts folks in the first three minutes of each quarter. The Morton coach, Bob Becker, wants his team to dominate in those minutes. Tonight, in those four three-minute segments, Morton outscored Canton, 8-2, 8-5, 9-5, and 9-4. That’s 34-16.
And look at the way they scored the 34 – from inside, from outside, on the run, out of sets. Look at just one of those segments, the three minutes beginning the third quarter, a time when a good team can bend a mediocre team to its will for the rest of the night. From a 34-19 halftime lead, the Potters moved to 43-24 this way . . .
First Lindsey Dullard scored on a put-back at 7:25. . . . Trapped in the deep left corner with nowhere to pass, Tenley Dowell decided to shoot – a 17-footer at 6:42 . . . Working off a steal in the Potters’ full-court press, Brandi Bisping dropped in a layup at 6:34 . . . at which time there came this roar from the Canton bench, Langhoff shouting, “TimeOUT!”
The stop was to no avail. Morton rolling . . . Josi Becker scored on a fast-break layup. . . . Then Dullard used a crafty shot-fake for a foul and a free throw. . . . In the three-minute, segment Morton had outscored Canton, 9-5. . . .And a lead that late in the second quarter had been only eight points – at 27-19 – now had grown to 19 at 43-24 with 5:20 to play in the third quarter. Game Over.
I liked a lot about that third quarter. I really liked the Potters’ starting lineup: Becker and Kassidy Shurman with the ball, Dowell and Dullard on the wings, Bisping in the paint.
Coincidence or a natural rise in confidence after a season’s experience, the 6-foot-1 freshman Dullard has played her best varsity basketball in the last two weeks after also suiting up – for the first time all year – to play a quarter in the junior varsity games. The ball-fake that drew a foul, a little thing that wins games, was one sign of Dullard’s growing comfort and assurance on the court. She scored 17 points, her career high. Four came on offensive rebounds. Six came on 3-pointers. Of her pair of 3’s, Dullard said, “I got my groove back, I think.”
Becker led Morton’s scoring with 19, Dowell had 12, and Bisping 10. Courtney Jones had 4, Bridget Wood 3, Jacey Wharram 2, and Caylie Jones 2.
Bisping had 10 rebounds, giving her 1,023 for her career, closing in on the record 1,049 of Cindy Bumgarner. Wharram also had 10 rebounds tonight.
As for the prom . . .
Cassidy Fawcett didn’t know what the boys were up to. “But I saw the signs when I came out in the introductions, and I knew it was Caleb asking,” she said.
So? A date?
“Yes,” she said.
And when Cassidy Fawcett left the gym tonight, she left carrying the five signs.