If Josi Morgan played for the Morton High School Lady Potters, you’d love her. I love her, anyway. She’s a tiny guard at Washington High who played her last home game tonight on the Panthers’ Senior Night. She didn’t get much done – 7 points – but at 5-foot-2 she’s an athlete quick and strong, she’s a firecracker competitor, she handles the ball every minute, and she scores from everywhere. A foot taller, maybe not even that much, she’d be Tenley Dowell.
So after the Potters beat Washington tonight, 67-44, I asked her, “How good is Morton now?”
“Really good,” Morgan said. “It felt like they made every shot they took. They made, like, EVERYTHING.”
“How tough,” I asked, “was the Morton press?”
“They had us kinda shaking in that first quarter,” she said of a quarter in which Morton’s pressing, trapping defense ignited a transition offense that distinguished itself with scoring of all kinds: fast break layups, mid-range jumpers, and 3-pointers. At the quarter, Morton led, 25-5.
“One time,” I said to Morgan, “they had both 6-footers, Dowell and Lindsey Dullard, trapping you.”
Standing at midcourt, there for the last time in a memorable career, Josi Morgan laughed out loud at the image of Dowell and Dullard towering over her, skyscrapers blotting out the little girl’s sun.
“They’re so long,” she said.
She laughed again. “It’s nuts!”
Thank you, Josi Morgan, for she has given us a new superlative. All season we have know the Lady Potters to be great, wonderful, awesome, and pretty dang good. Now, in trying to define the indefinable, Josi Morgan teaches us to say, “It’s nuts!”
It’s nuts to think the Lady Potters are this good. They’ve won 25 straight games. They’re 28-1 for the season. They recently beat somebody, 84-11.They beat somebody else, 77-33. They’ve done it playing their starters a half. All 14 varsity players have scored in multiple games. Tonight the Potters were efficient on offense, merciless on defense, and relentlessly aggressive at both ends. For a month now, in the manner of outstanding teams playing well, they have made the game look ridiculously easy. As coach Bob Becker said tonight, “They’ve been so consistently excellent. These kids are amazing.”
It’s nuts to think the Potters could have named the score tonight — nuts, maybe, but accurate. Had Becker said so, it could have been 107-27. Morton’s trapping defense was so good that Washington no longer chose where to throw its passes, and by that I mean Morton forced passes to go where they wanted them to go. And Becker was shouting from the bench, “Get that, get THAT,” meaning go get that pass that we forced them to to throw to us.
The coach was so engaged with his team’s defense that it seemed his ambition was limitless. Afterwards, I suggested that he wanted to hold Washington scoreless.
“Why not?” he said, smiling. “You’re not going to lose many games if the other team doesn’t score.”
It’s also nuts to think the Potters are now seven victories away from becoming the first girls program ever to win four straight state championships. They begin tournament play Tuesday at Herscher in a 6 p.m. regional game against Monday’s Pontiac-Coal City winner.
(Wait. Have I mentioned the Washington pep band yet? I have hated on it for years. I have hated on it because it plays SO FREAKIN’ LOUD I CAN’T HEAR MYSELF SAY THE POPCORN IS TERRIBLE. It has played at jet-fighter volume. Tonight, to be fair, it didn’t seem so bad, though it’s possible my hearing has been so damaged in previous visits that I wouldn’t know if a shotgun went off beside my earlobe.)
Anyway, seven more victories – two in a regional at Herscher, two in a sectional at Dunlap, one in a super-sectional at Coal City, and two in the finals at Redbird Arena. “Now we go on the road,” Becker said.
So, after tonight’s exercise, I asked the Potters’ starters: “How ready is the team to win a fourth straight state championship?”
Kassidy Shurman: “We can go all the way if we continue to do the right things in practice and stay focused, one game at a time.”
Caylie Jones: “We’re really ready. We’ve been playing consistently for the whole 32 minutes every game.”
Josi Becker: “Now we’re coming to the best part of the season.”
Tenley Dowell: “Right now everyone has confidence. Every one of us can score. We’re ready.”
Lindsey Dullard: “It’s going to be a fun road trip.”
Tonight’s victory gave the Potters a second straight undefeated season in the Mid-Illii Conference (14-0, ith a 33-game winning streak in the league). After seasons of 33-3, 33-3, and 34-2, the Potters could go 35-1 this time.
Bob Becker, for one, expects it.
“I feel confident,” he said. “Somebody’s gonna have to play a great game to beat us.”
Dowell led Morton’s scoring tonight with 15. Dullard had 13, Shurman 12, Caylie Jones 10. Josie Becker had 5, Bridget Wood and Maddy Becker had 3 each, Peyton Dearing and Addi Cox had 2 each, and Olivia Remmert and Courtney Jones had 1 each.