Morton’s Lady Potters 66, Canton 19

“You’ve got 9 seconds,” the coach, Bob Becker, shouted from his spot in front of the Morton bench.

Canton was shooting a free throw with :09.6 showing on the clock.

This was about to become really fun.

The girl made the free throw.

“And we ran ‘flash,’” the Potters’ Raquel Frakes said later.

What happens in “Flash” is that after the free throw the Potters make the in-bounds pass to Frakes.

And Frakes is gone in a . . .

F
L
A
S
H

Coast to coast, end to end, from under one hoop to under the other one, and the only question is:

Who needs a stinkin’ 9 seconds?

Not Frakes. Once a state champion hurdler. Not Frakes. Who hits top speed in a step and a half. Not Frakes. Who on the dribble went past stuck-to-the-floor Canton players who, if they saw anything at all, saw nothing more than a glimpse of Frakes’s ginger ponytail in full flight.

“That,” Becker said later, “was a confident, aggressive attack of the basket.”

“I thought, ‘Whoa!’” Courtney Jones said. “Raquel, the speed demon!”

When Frakes’s layup dropped through, the clock showed :04.9.

Do the math: 4.7 seconds to fly from New York to California.

In the normal run of events, the Frakes bucket wasn’t important. Morton had long since won the game. After a quarter, it led 24-0. At halftime, 43-12. It was 55-19 when Becker stood at his bench and said, “You’ve got 9 seconds.”

But these are not normal times for the Potters. They are now 28-0. They are 11-0 in the Mid-Illini Conference. Their goal is a fifth state championship in six seasons. If they do that, they’re likely to finish with a 38-0 record. To do that, they need Frakes to be what Becker told us she was early this season: “The best sixth man in the entire state.”

Coming off the bench, Frakes changes games. She brings size (5-foot-10) along with that speed and outstanding jumping ability. She can score inside and from the 3-point line. As the leaping centerpiece of the Potters’ “mayhem” press, she intimidates ball-handlers into high, cross-court passes they should never try against defenders knowing that Frakes will cause those terrible passes.

So the Potters are a better team with Frakes than they were without her in the last month as she recovered from a broken left wrist.

“She’s worked really hard to get back,” Jones said. “It’s taken a couple games, it’s a chemistry thing, and she’s good now.”

In five games back, tonight’s was Frakes’s best. Off the bench midway in the first quarter, she quickly became an integral part of the Potters’ defensive domination. By my count, the Potters made 14 steals and/or deflections in the quarter. Frakes had three deflections; she also had a steal for a breakaway layup that made it 19-0.

“I felt back to normal, finally,” she said, meaning back to where she was before the injury. “Even when I first got back into practice, the wrist hurt bad.” What she liked most tonight, she said, was her work at the rim. While she had had no trouble getting shots in the paint, she hurried more of them than she had liked. Tonight Frakes was both quick inside and soft with her hands, giving layups a chance to find their ways off the glass and into the net – or, as she put it, “I knew I had to finish. Now I’m getting there.”

Frakes led Morton’s scoring with 13. Katie Krupa and Lindsey Dullard had 11 (9 in the first quarter). Jones and Sedona McCartney had 7 each. Peyton Dearing had 6, Maggie Hobson 5, and Gabby Heer, Abby Steider, and Cailyn Cowley each had 2.

One more thing.

Update on the Brooke Bisping engagement . . . .

Tommy Rush and the Potters assistant coach have set a date for the wedding – July 4.

I had a question. My very first paying job as a newspaperman caused me to fill in for vacationing staffers at the Lincoln Daily Courier. My first professional words appeared on the society page. I wrote up weddings. So, when Tommy told me tonight that Brooke had already bought her wedding gown, I immediately asked him to describe it.

Which makes me the latest clueless man in this saga. Everyone knows the groom doesn’t see the gown until the day. Everyone knows the bride would never describe it.

“You can say it’s white,” he said.

“And it’s beautiful,” she said.

Morton’s Lady Potters 66, Metamora 43

During the jayvee game, Brooke Bisping sat alongside Bob Becker. The assistant coach sat alongside the head coach as she had sat alongside him a hundred other times. Just casually. Leaning toward him, as if to better hear what he had to say. She let her left hand dangle across her right wrist. Occasionally, she lifted that left hand toward the coach. One time she made a fist with that left hand and punched the air in front of the coach’s face.

As Bisping moved her left hand to and fro, a light seemed to flash from that hand.

A glint. A sparkle. You might even call it a diamond’s twinkle.

From two rows behind Bisping and Becker, I recognized the source of that light. Here I violated several journalistic stay-out-of-the-story rules by suggesting to Bisping, with a gesture or two, that she stand in front of Becker and use her left hand to scratch her nose with the ring finger of that hand.

She did that. Her face was alight with joy. Such fun she was having.

And here’s what Becker did in response.

He scratched his own nose.

He thought to brush away whatever Bisping had seen there.

So she did it again, the scratching thing. Only this time she moved from scratching to waving the ring finger in the light, and now Becker, finally pulled out of his basketball bubble, saw Bisping’s fingers moving and he saw the twinkle and he understood what it meant and he laughed out loud. Then, more loudly yet, and in agreement with every woman who has ever considered men clueless, the coach said, “I’M AN IDIOT!”

After which he rushed to embrace Bisping, and what a wonderful moment that was, 16 years after the freshman Brooke Bisping became a rising star on the first of Becker’s dominant Lady Potters’ teams, ultimately the leading scorer in Potters history and now Becker’s assistant on four state championship teams.

“Nothing real dramatic,” Tommy Rush said. “We’d been watching ‘Star Wars’ on TV.” He is a resident physician in radiology at OSF Hospital in Peoria. For most of three years now, he and Bisping have been a couple. “I took the ring out and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ She said, ‘Are you proposing?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and she said, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’”

We’ll get back to the ring at the end of this, but this is a basketball blog, after all, and we ought to talk about basketball a little, although the Potters did to Metamora tonight what they’ve done to most everybody all season. Allowing nothing on defense, doing everything on offense, they ran up a big lead early, 21-6. When Metamora thought to rally late, the Potters ran away and hid; in the fourth quarter, they stretched a 10-point lead to 27 points in 4 minutes and 8 seconds of play.

Let’s go there. Metamora came in with a 17-5 record, 7-3 in the Mid-Illini Conference. It might have thought it had a chance tonight when it outscored Morton 9-2 in two minutes and trailed only 47-37. But, really. Metamora had no chance. It had scored four cheap-o buckets in the last minute of the third quarter and early in the fourth – just enough to get the Lady Potters’ attention back on the task at hand.

And there they went on a 19-2 run.

Lindsey Dullard, playing with four fouls, slashed to the rim for two….Peyton Dearing, a demon on defense, perhaps subjecting Metamora’s poor, poor point guard to nightmares for the rest of February – “I give her an A+, Peyton’s the best on-the-ball defender I’ve seen,” Becker said – and she can play with the ball as well, following Dullard’s layyup with a 3 from the deep right corner.

Katie Krupa ran the score to 54-37 with two free throws, then her fellow sophomore, Maggie Hobson, knocked in a 3 and layup off a
Courtney Jones pass in the paint….Dearing followed with a second 3, her third of the game….Jones dropped in a mid-range jumper .. . and Dearing carried a Dullard pass in for a fast-break two.

Suddenly, but in no surprise, it was 66-39.

And Morton now is 27-0, on a 37-game winning streak reaching into last season. And it is 10-0 in the Mid-Illini Conference, on a 57-game winning streak there. And in the last five seasons and this one so far, Morton is 191-13. (Causing me to tell a friend the Potters are “the UConn of the heartland.” Sort of, anyway. In the same time period, UConn is 198-7. Close enough for me.)

Back to the twinkling ring . . . .

In the locker room afterwards, as the coach, Becker, reviewed the game, senior forward Makenna Baughman noticed a glint, a sparkle, a flash of diamond’s light on the left hand of the assistant coach, Bisping, and Baughman, being a young woman and not a clueless man, immediately whispered to Olivia Remmert, another senior, “Is that an engagement ring on Brooke’s hand?”

Which caused Remmert to take one look and shout, “OH, MY GOODNESS!”

That was the end of the Becker review because Remmert bounced over to Bisping, raised her hand high for all to see, and there ensued such a hullabaloo of celebration that when Bisping later returned to Tommy Rush’s side, she said, “THEY WERE ALL SCREAMING…and I think I’m deaf now.”

Dearing led Morton’s scoring with 15, Dullard had 14, Jones 13. Krupa amd Hobson had 8 each,. Raquel Frakes 6, and Remmert 2.

Morton’s Lady Potters 64, Washington 43

Before the game began, the Potters were behind, 1-0, and it was 1-0 only because the Washington free throw shooter missed her first one. On Pink Night, the Potters had been charged with a technical foul. T’s are usually dished out to coaches for bad behavior featuring four-letter words. It was, in fact, a four-letter word that got the Potters in trouble.

The word was pink.

“Do you have the letter saying you can wear pink?” a referee had asked the Morton coach, Bob Becker, during the pre-game meeting of captains and referees.

Becker said, “Huh?” The coach’s reply may have lacked eloquence. But it was filled with perspective and a quiet, burning indignation. In Becker’s 21 seasons as the Potters’ coach, his teams have always come to Pink Night wearing pink uniforms. And never did a referee T’up the Potters.

“How long’s that been a rule?” Becker asked, no answer forthcoming other than, well, it’s a rule.

At some indeterminate time – Becker plans to find out when – the Illinois High School Association bureaucrats did what bureaucrats often do. One day they had no real work. So they created a rule that if you wanted to wear a pink uniform, you had to get IHSA permission.

I suppose there’s good reason for that. Maybe a road team wearing red confuses a color-blind zebra. But, really. Let’s be grown-ups here. Pink Night is a celebration of the courage we need to face cancer. On Pink Night in the Potterdome, Becker’s players climb into the bleachers to deliver pink roses to survivors of cancer. What a beautiful thing on this night to see a Potter in her pink uniform, the junior Raquel Frakes, go running – running with a rose in her hand! – to the top of the bleachers to make a man smile. You want to know what beauty is? Every year we see it on Pink Night. Beauty is that video of Mary Schultz. Once the Team Mom, mother of two Potters, we see her again and we hear her singing the national anthem in the last year of her life.

And we’re worried that the Potters wore pink?

It’s a technical foul?

Hell, it oughta be a law that every home team wears pink on Pink Night.

I feel better already.

Now, back to the game . . .

Washington’s 1-0 lead lasted all of one minute and 14 seconds. It lasted until Katie Krupa’s two free throws. About four minutes later, Morton led, 12-1. At halftime, it was 25-9. Once again, the obvious was unavoidable: Morton is just too good for everyone in the Mid-Illini Conference. Washington came in with an 18-4 record, 7-2 in the league. Those are nice numbers except that Morton came in 25-0 and 8-0 (with a 55-game winning M-I streak).

The game became interesting for about four minutes in the third quarter. Washington suddenly broke free for layup after layup, some on set plays but more than one when it out-ran Potters for fast-break layups.

Nothing bothers a basketball coach more than opponents going coast-to-coast for uncontested layups. The Potters still had a comfortable lead at 36-21 midway in the third period. (Thanks mostly to Peyton Dearing’s three 3-pointers in three straight possessions.) But Washington, after scoring only the 9 first-half points, had scored 12 in four minutes of the third.

So Bob Becker called a timeout. During the timeout, the coach’s body language was such that I made a note: “3:53, M time, BB HOT.”

“I told them they were blowing assignments,” he said later. “We needed to refocus and regroup.”

That, they did.

Dearing recalled the coach as mild-mannered and cool. “He told us we knew what to do, we’d figure it out,” the senior guard said.

That, they also did.

After the timeout, Morton outscored Washington, 11-6, with Lindsey Dullard scoring the last nine of those points. At 47-27, the Potters coasted into the last quarter. One 17-3 run left Washington gasping for breath, literally worn out, trailing 55-30 and reduced to throwing up prayers, most of them unanswered.

Ah, speaking of Lindsey Dullard – the team’s leading scorer returned to action after missing five games with a concussion. She played as boldly as ever, slashing to the basket and unrelenting on defense. Eleven of her 15 points came in the third quarter.

“I feel really good,” Dullard said afterwards. “I felt good at practice yesterday, the first time I’d been allowed contact, and I felt good tonight.” As for the Potters defense — sensational, save for those few third-quarter minutes — Dullard said, “We were really talking and flying around,”

Dullard and Dearing both had 15 points. Krupa had 13, Courtney Jones 8. Frakes, in her second game back after a month out with a broken wrist, had 7 points, the left-hander’s last two coming on a curling finish in the paint with her right hand. Olivia Remmert, Makenna Baughman, and Abby Steider had 2 points each.

Morton’s Lady Potters 45, Rock Island 33

What to say about Courtney Jones?

Let’s go to the notebook.

“CT long pass off RE of 3”

“CT 3l”

“CT 8’ stumbling”

“CT 3r”

“CT steals x-ct pass”

“CT lu”

“CT blox 3”

“CT 9 of 12 in 4th”

Some translation may be necessary. CT is short for Court, short for Courtney. RE is rebound, 3 is a 3-point shot, l is the left side, 8’ is distance of shot, r is right, lu is layup, x-ct is cross-court, blox is blocks.

Sorry to put the dear reader through that code work. But it’s necessary to show as quickly as possible that Courtney Jones did some of everything all night long in a game that was up for grabs until Jones grabbed it in the fourth quarter.

Everywhere you looked, everywhere the ball went, there was Courtney Jones flying. “She was all over the entire 84 feet by 50 feet,” coach Bob Becker said. Yea, verily, the Potters 5-foot-7 senior point guard gave a master class in How to Play the Game. On defense, she was stealth weaponized – deflecting passes, forcing bad passes, seeming to know before Rock Island knew where it would next throw the ball. Offensively it’s Jones’s job, which she does exceptionally well, to control her team’s pace and movement. On this night, she also led the team’s scoring with 16 – the most important 9 coming in the fourth quarter, all coming after Rock Island had moved within four at 33-29 with 6:05 to play. That this was a game should have been no surprise.

Rock Island came to Morton having won 19 games, their last nine in a row. The Rocks came to town ranked 11th in the Class 3A poll. They came with a proud basketball history. These people were not cupcakes of the sort that would fall to crumbs, even against the Potters, ranked No. 1 and winners of 24 straight.

Four points, 6:05 to play.

The ball found Jones deep in the right corner.

She had a thought that she explained later.

“I thought I better shoot it,” she said, “or I’d get yelled at.”

The yeller-in-chief is Becker, who, yelling at Jones from time to time, had suggested/ordered/tough-love-coached-her-up to shoot anytime she had a good look.

The time had come.

BANG!

As tenuous as a 4-point lead feels, somehow a 7-point lead in the fourth quarter feels like . . .

“You breathing again?” assistant coach Bill Davis later asked the notekeeper in the row behind the bench.

“Started at 3:50,” I said, noting a time that Raquel Frakes – welcome back, Raquel – made a nifty entry pass to Katie Krupa for a layup and the Potters’ second 7-point lead, a lead that soon grew to 11 with a minute and a half to play.

Breathing, it felt so good.

It hadn’t happened much since the first 3 ½ minutes of the game. Early on, Morton was as good as Morton gets. It ran off to a 14-0 lead. Working nicely in the paint, Krupa scored the game’s first nine points, the last two off that long Jones pass out of a rebound. Then Jones added a 3 from the left side and a put-back of her own missed layup.

It was 14-4 at the quarter, 22-16 at the half, 33-27 after three.

Rock Island kept it close with man-to-man defense so aggressive – hands clawing, bodies bumping – that Morton found it difficult to run any offense smoothly. Even the usually indefatigable Jones said, “It was one of the most up-in-you games ever. I’ve never been that tired in any game.”

Jones’s tour de force tonight was not her first in the last month, or even her best in the last month, but it may have been the most important in showing the Potters they can “find a way” – to quote Becker’s coaching mantra – to win against good teams no matter the circumstances. Tonight Maddy Becker did not play – that knee. Lindsey Dullard did not play – she returns next Tuesday. Raquel Frakes played for the first time in a month and profited from her time in the fire again.

So I said to Jones, “You’ve been so good lately,” and then I began taking notes furiously, which is to say I took notes that are now unreadable, because when Jones starts talking, she talks really really fast, so it comes out looking like….

“Itsallthoseyearsplayinginpractice . . . .”

Got that, dear reader?

“….playingagainstgreatplayerslikeBrandiBispingJosiBeckerTenleyDowell . . .”

Still with us?

“…andifIhadntplayedagainstgreatplayerslikethatIwouldntbetheplayerIam…”

Here, she smiled. Here, Jones stopped talking. She stopped talking to say that she had just heard what she said.

“Hey, that’s a good quote,” she said. “I should say that slower.”

And she did.

“If I hadn’t played against great players like that,” she said, “I wouldn’t be the player I am.”

So I go to the yeller-in-chief again to inquire about the wonderful Ms. Jones.

“What a motor,” Becker said. “Courtney’s not a flip-switcher who turns it on and off. It’s never off. She has a competitive fire second to none.”

And, gee, she talks fast.

“She does EVERYTHING fast,” the coach said. “More than once, she has gone to her car, turned on the ignition, and realized she had to come back inside. She just left the car running and went back out.”

Becker laughed. “True story,” he said, as if anyone had reason to disbelieve it.

Jones had her 16 points. Krupa had 15, Peyton Dearing 8, Olivia Remmert 3, and Maggie Hobson 3.

Morton’s Lady Potters 73, East Peoria 29

Not much of a game because, for reasons unknown, Morton always has the better athletes better prepared to play high-level basketball. With seven Potters scoring, it was 28-3 after a quarter. Against Morton’s unrelenting full-court trapping defense, East Peoria made 15 trips down-court before getting off a shot. Now the Potters are 24-0, East Peoria 3-18. But I digress.

Let’s get back to the national anthem.

With players, coaches, and officials lined up, the public address announcer asked everyone in the East Peoria High School gymnasium to stand, face the flag, and honor America during the playing of the national anthem.

We stood.

We waited for the music.

Music?

No music.

We waited some more.

Then someone whose voice sounded like mine said, “We’re ready.”

Silence.

Until this happened.

We all started singing.

The Star Spangled Banner, done a cappella by a couiple hundred people in from a snowstorm.

Not that we raised the roof with our mighty voices. Not that anyone was on key. It wasn’t even that we all remembered the words exactly, though we did start well: “Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light . . . ”

Still, beautiful.

The p.a. man said, “Good job, fans,” and we gave ourselves a round of applause, and finally we sat down to watch the undefeated, No. 1-ranked, defending state champion Lady Potters win their 34th straight game over two seasons and their 55th straight in the Mid-Illini Conference (8-0 this season and likely en route to their sixth straight M-I title, the last four with 14-0 records).

It didn’t take long to notice a trend in this one.

Morton scored at will, East Peoria never scored.

It was 20-0 at 3:20 of the first quarter.

Morton’s scoring in that run: a Courtney Jones rebound, a Maggie Hobson 3 (in the sophomore’s first varsity start), a Katie Krupa fast-break layup, another Krupa layup, a Peyton Dearing 3 (the East Peoria transfer!), a Jones 3, an Olivia Remmert layup, and a Krupa rebound-and-one.

Do that for 32 minutes and the score is about 140-0.

Soon enough, it was 43-6 and I had made one note worth repeating here.

**“EP 5 air-balls in one possession. A record?”

(It started with an air-ball 3 caught and thrown back wildly over the hoop where, three times, battling East Peorians snared rebounds and flung the rock high and in the direction of the basket, injuring only the airspace above the iron.)

It was 62-22 after three quarters when I thought to do the first in-game interview in my hundred years doing this work. Three of the Potters’ stars – Lindsey Dullard, Maddy Becker, Raquel Frakes – had chosen to sit together on the team bench, though none would play, all injured.

When Dullard came to the bench after the third-quarter break, I asked, “How’s the headache?” An all-stater and the team’s leading scorer, Dullard has missed four games with a concussion. She had been told she would be re-evaluated once her symptoms were gone, the primary symptom being headaches.

“It’s OK,” Dullard said. “A little bit, still.” She held a finger a touch away from her thumb. “But OK.”

Earlier, I had asked Maddy Becker about her right knee, injured two days before.

With crutches beside her, Becker sat on the second row of bleachers during the jayvee game. She had an ice pack on her knee – she suffered an ACL tear in the left knee last February – and did not yet know the extent of this new injury.

“It’s still real swollen and hurts,” she said.

Her coach and father, Bob Becker, said 1) x-rays had revealed no bone damage, 2) an orthopedist’s hands-on examination was inconclusive, and 3) results of an MRI test are due to be delivered Friday morning. “It still could be an ACL or miniscus,” Becker said.

There’s another possibility, too, Maddy Becker said: “It could be a bone bruise.”

While preferable to ligament damage necessitating surgery, a deep bone bruise might sideline Becker for a month, by which time the Potters would be starting state tournament play.

“We’ll know more in the morning,” Bob Becker said tonight, “when the doctor reads the MRI.”

As for Frakes, whose broken left wrist has kept her out for two weeks, she will return Saturday night when the Potters play at home against Rock Island.

Is she ready?

“Soooo ready,” she said.

Wait.

More good news.

On the way into the night’s snowstorm, I first passed by Lindsey Dullard, who elaborated on her condition. Turns out, as we say in the news business, she had buried the lead during our in-game conversation.

“I’ve been cleared to practice tomorrow,” she said. “No contact, but okay’d on running and shooting. If all goes well, I’ll play next Tuesday.”

That’s a game in the Potterdome against Washington.

Dearing led Morton’s scoring tonight with 15. Krupa had 13, Jones and Cailyn Cowley 9 each, Remmert 8, Hobson 6, Abby Steider 4, and with 3 apiece Faith Hostetler, Claire Reiman, and Makenna Baughman.

Morton’s Lady Potters 62, Bloomington 29

Sometimes you just want to hug ‘em all.

Tonight in the Potterdome was such a time.

They were as good as they could be.

And then, two minutes and 29 seconds into the second quarter, senior guard Maddy Becker went down with a knee injury.

She writhed in pain as play went away from her, going downcourt, leaving her alone on the floor until a timeout was called and her coach, her father, Bob Becker, walked the 50 feet to where his daughter held tight to her right knee.

The coach had been there before. Eleven months ago, Maddy went down in the sectional championship game with what turned out to be a torn anterior cruciate ligament. Surgery repaired it and nine months later she was again a starter for the Potters, again an outstanding 3-point shooter, again a team leader by act and emotion.

Then, on a drive down the right side of the lane, a collision, or a tangle, or something we might just call “basketball,” Maddy fell hard and immediately was in pain. As her dad held her hands, she told him it hurt worse than the one a year ago. “There wasn’t a ‘pop’ like last time,” the coach said. “She said it felt like ‘something slid over something.’”

She will go to an orthopedist in the morning. “Because there wasn’t a pop doesn’t mean anything,” Becker said. “It could be a slight tear. We don’t know. We’ll know more in the morning.”

What we knew tonight was that it hurt in every way these things hurt.

Peyton Dearing, another senior guard, may be Maddy Becker’s closest friend on the team. She was on the bench the minute it happened. When Maddy Becker had been helped off the floor and into the locker room, her dad came back to the bench. He sat in pale silence. Next to him, Dearing wiped away tears. Another senior, Courtney Jones, wrapped an arm around Dearing.

For almost four minutes of game action, almost 10 minutes of a father’s life, Bob Becker didn’t say a word, didn’t raise up off the bench, maybe saw the game happening, maybe didn’t see a thing.

“I might not have been all there,” he told his tream in the locker room afterwards. “I’ll have to regroup, we’ll all have to regroup.”

They’ve done it before. This is the third time for the coach/father. Five seasons ago, his older daughter, Josi, tore an ACL in the Potterdome. “It hurt me more than it hurt Josi,” he said that night. And yet, in March that season, the Potters won their first Class 3A state championship – and Josi Becker made a cameo appearance at the title game’s end, in uniform, on the court with her teammates. And last season, after Maddy was hurt, her teammates won another state championship.

Some basketball here, for a minute:

Sensational in all the ways they’re capable of sensation, the undefeated Potters won their 23rd straight game, raising the number to 33 if we count last season’s run to their fourth state championship in five years. They moved the ball effortlessly and with purpose aforethought. Their trapping zone press was a piece of basketball magic, as Becker had suggested on his coach’s whiteboard: “RELENTLESS PRESSURE.” The idea was to trap the ball-handler and force an escape pass to where the Potters would intercept it – the Potters playing chess while Bloomington played checkers.

Nobody did that magic better than Courtney Jones this night. The 5-foot-7 point guard has matured into a floor leader who combines basketball instinct and savvy in ways that make her at once an outstanding offensive player, defender, and rebounder. She scored 13 points in the first quarter as the Potters sprinted to a 27-7 lead. My favorite Jones moment: leaning over the end line, she slapped a rebound in-bounds, and then stole it from the Bloomington player who caught it, and then took two dribbles to the free throw line and knocked down a 15-footer. In the quarter’s last three minutes, she made two 3-pointers.

It was 36-7 when Maddy Becker fell.

The air went out of the building.

I wanted to go home.

The Potters scored two more points that quarter.

Maybe they wanted to go home, too.

Maddy Becker returned to the bench at the start of the third quarter. She wore an ice pack on the back of her right knee. The Potterdome spectators, those from Bloomington as well as Morton, gave her a nice round of applause.

When Becker came out of the locker at game’s end, the junior Raquel Frakes opened wide her arms and gave the coach a hug.

“Give Maddy a big one,” he said.

“I did,” Frakes said.

As Maddy left the building with her mother, Evelyn, I thought to talk to her. But Evelyn shook her head not now, and I just touched Maddy’s arm. There would be another, better time.

A half-hour later, Bob Becker stood near the scorer’s table. There he told Courtney Jones she had played very well, especially in that first quarter. He also said, again, that he would have to regroup, to get his mind right for the games to come. Jones, smiling, touched her head and said, “Jedi mind tricks!”

Becker thought of another movie. He said, “I’d rather be Mr. Miyagi in ‘The Karate Kid.’”

The karate master Mr. Miyagi healed injured students with an ancient energy-transfer technique, Moto-Ki, or, as Mr. Miyagi put it, “Smack hands together and rub.”

Ah, if only.

Jones led Morton’s scoring with 15. Katie Krupa had 14 and Makenna Baughman 10. Dearing and Cailyn Cowley each had 5. Maddy Becker had 4, Maggie Hobson 3, and Paige Griffin, Abby Steider, and Olivia Remmert had 2 each.

Just three weeks into 2020, the Morton Lady Potters have had a number of challenges thrown at them.  From facing tough, State ranked competition on the road, to battling through injuries to key players, managing #1 rankings, winning streaks and reaching milestones, these Lady Potters have passed every test to improve their season record to 22-0.

Into the Lions Den
The Lady Potters first game in 2020 was a trip into the Lions Den to face the formidable Peoria High Lions who are currently 17-3 and ranked #7 in the State of Illinois in the latest AP poll.  I think they may be underrated at #7 myself.  The Lions play fast and furious on defense and like to make their opponents uncomfortable by speeding them up and making decisions quicker than they want to.  The Lady Potters were expecting the inevitable pressure and physical play of the Lions coming into the game, but it still caused headaches for the Potters.  A season high 21 turnovers was a result.  It certainly didn’t help matters that the Lady Potters were still trying to adjust to life without their star 6th man, Raquel Frakes, who broke a bone in her left wrist vs Lincoln-Way West at the State Farm Classic in December.  Coach Becker used the opportunity to test some players that had not been put in that situation before.  Luckily the Lady Potters were able to make enough big plays down the stretch to pull away for a 48-42 win.  I think the Lady Potters players and coaching staff learned a lot from the game.

Gone Streaking
The Lady Potters have several winning streaks going on currently.  They currently have won 22 games straight this season and 32 in a row going back to their last loss (Feb 2nd, 2019 OT loss vs Fremd).  They have won 54 straight Mid-Illini Conference games in a row and the Seniors (Class of 2020) have never lost a Mid-Illini game.  They have been the model of Consistent Excellence winning all 49 of their Mid-Illini contests so far.  Through the first half of Mid-Illini Conference play the Lady Potters are 7-0 and have a 2 game lead on 2nd place teams Washington & Dunlap (both 5-2).  The Lady Potters have won the Mid-Illini Conference 5 years in a row and are going for their 6th. Their last Conference loss was at East Peoria, on January 22nd, 2016. With all of the lofty rankings, winning streaks and past success, comes a big target on your back every night.  Everyone has the Lady Potter game circled on their schedule.  Which means that the Lady Potters have to circle every game on their schedule.

A Mighty Big Milestone
If you haven’t heard yet about Coach Becker’s 500th win on Saturday, January 18th, I only have one question for you.  Where have you been?  The 500th win came in a 55-25 victory over Lincoln High School at the PotterDome.  Almost exactly 3 years after his 400th win which came on January 14th, 2017 vs Normal U-High.  This is Coach Becker’s 21st year as Head Coach of the Morton Lady Potters. His career record is currently 501 wins and 149 losses (.771).  You can view his entire bio page by clicking here: Coach Becker Bio Page. Congrats Coach!!!

The Injury Bug
Injuries seem to happen every year and this year is no exception, as the injury bug is hitting the Lady Potters hard this month.  The Lady Potters’ lost super athletic Junior guard-forward, Raquel Frakes to a wrist injury on December 28th.  She is hopeful to return January 25th.  Coach Becker has called Raquel the “Best 6th Man in the State”, which goes to show you how much he thinks of her and her role with the Lady Potters.  Less than 2 weeks later, All-State guard-forward, Lindsey Dullard get’s a concussion, 49 seconds into the game with Metamora on January 11th, on a hard foul as she was going up for a lay-up.  Lindsey missed the rest of the Metamora game, as well as the Conference road game at Dunlap and the non-conference games vs Lincoln & Galesburg.  Her return date is unknown, but will hopefully be back in a week or two if all goes well.  In the absence of these two Lady Potter stars, everyone else has stepped up and taken larger roles.  The Potters are still winning games by large margins, but one thing I have noticed is that the defense has really stepped it up. The Potters had been allowing 40.1 ppg prior to the new year and through the last 7 games are only allowing 27.8 ppg and 26.75 ppg over their last 4 games. Coach Becker’s response, when asked what his team would be like when Dullard & Frakes return, was “SCARY”.

What’s Next
The Lady Potters play Bloomington High School on Tuesday, Jan 21st at the PotterDome, then will continue Mid-Illini Conference play on Thursday, Jan 23rd at East Peoria and host Rock Island on Saturday, Jan 25th.  The Lady Potters have 9 games left before the post season begins and 7 of those games will be at home in the PotterDome.  So don’t miss the opportunity to come out and cheer on your Lady Potters!

1. Morton’s Lady Potters 56, Galesburg 33

   Beginning his search for the next 500 victories of his career, Bob Becker called out to the far end of the court.

   “GIVE IT TO KATIE!”

   The Lady Potters’ ball-handlers seemed not to have seen Katie Krupa working hard to make herself visible.

   “GIVE IT TO KATIE!”

   The coach raised the decibel level a notch when his ball-handlers, for reasons known only to themselves, seemed content with moving the rock around the edges of the Galesburg defense.

   And then Becker, in his 21st season as the Potters’ coach, must have felt all the frustration and exasperation of a rookie who knew what he wanted done and didn’t know how to get it done – because now people in the top row on the other side of the Potterdome heard him shout . . . .

   ‘GIVE IT TO HER!!!!!”

   Someone did. Krupa took the ball in the paint. Curled in a layup.

   Curious basketball fans may wonder when this drama took place. How big a deal was it that someone, anyone, pretty please, give the ball to Krupa?

   Not a big deal, really.

   The game had just started.

   One minute and 35 seconds in, Bob Becker was begging for someone, anyone, pretty please make an entry pass to the post. Krupa’s bucket made the score Morton 6, Galesburg 2.

   But the layman’s “not a big deal, really” can be a coach’s really big deal because the coach isn’t thinking about this minute or this game or this week. The coach is playing a long game. It’s January and it’s cold outside, but the coach isn’t thinking about how cold it’s suddenly become. He’s thinking about February. He’s not playing a short little game on a January night. He’s playing a long game that will get his team into big games in February and, he hopes, bigger games the first weekend in March.

   So . . .

   The coach wants the ball moved into the paint, moved to the likes of Katie Krupa, because in February and March it’s always good to have a big post shooting layups. By the first quarter’s end tonight, Krupa had turned entry passes into three layups, the last a dandy on a move across the paint to score with her left hand. She finished with 15 points, a dozen coming at the rim, the stuff of big-game winners.

   All that said, and it’s all true, it was only part of Krupa’s good work tonight. Yes, the undefeated No. 1-ranked Potters were always going to win their 22d game no matter how well Galesburg played (13-8 coming in). Still, the game was competitive until late in the second quarter.

   With 3:51 to play in the half, Morton led 22-13. It then went on a 13-3 run for a 35-16 halftime lead. In that run, Krupa scored once and twice made slick passes that led to field goals. The lead grew to 44-19 in the first four minutes of the third quarter – a Morton habit, those third quarter runs – and the run was kick-started by two Krupa layups created on threading-the-needle passes from Peyton Dearing and Courtney Jones.

   Turn out the lights, party’s over.

   A note: Becker has now won 501 games. His opposite number this night, Galesburg’s Evan Massey, in his 42nd season, has won 926 games. Do not hold your breath, folks, until we next see a game matching Illinois Hall of Fame coaches with 1,427 victories between them.

   Another note: Lindsey Dullard, Morton’s leading scorer, did not play, still dealing with concussion symptoms. She did, however, casually shoot free throws in the team’s shoot-around this morning. “Made a couple,” she said. Until her symptoms clear up, she will not be re-evaluated for a return to action. “I’m better,” she said, “but still some headaches.”

   A third note: Kindly folks have advised me that I’m wrong about the effects of passing a kidney stone. In my report on the Peyton Dearing recovery after one day’s soul-searing pain, I suggested that even a man of my great courage and immense strength would need a month to recuperate and then only under the tender mercies of sweet-hearted nurses waving garenias under my nose. But three friends have insisted that once the stone passes, everything’s fine. “I could have tap-danced across the Arctic Ocean,” Potters assistant coach Bill Davis said, or maybe he said he could have moon-walked across the Illinois River, I’m not sure. I had quit listening at “I could have tap-danced . . .” (Davis as Fred Astaire? I don’t think so.)

   Anyway, I’ll take their word for it. I don’t want to ever find out. Even typing “kidney stones” makes me want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head – which I’ll do as soon as I finish three beers.

   Krupa led Morton with 15 points. Jones had 10, Dearing 9, Olivia Remmert 6, Maggie Hobson 5, Maddy Becker 5, Cailyn Cowley 4, and Makenna Baughman 2.

Morton’s Lady Potters 55, Lincoln 25

With 28 seconds to play, our favorite kidney-stone-passing girl, Peyton Dearing, rose off the Lady Potters bench and held high a huge portrait of our favorite 500-game-winning basketball coach, Bob Becker. Facing the bleachers, she signaled to the gathered fans that they should stand and cheer. And there rose in the Potterdome the chant, “Bobby B . . . Bobby
B . . . Bobby B.”

Bobby B, smiling, just sat on the bench.

Everyone else rose. Players, coaches, fans. All rose in applause for the coach who in his 21st season would win his 500th game.

And Bobby B sat there, head down, smiling, the sound washing over him.

“It’s about the administrators and coaches and players,” he said later. He called his wife, Evelyn, “the humbler and the motivator . . .the backbone . . . I love her to death,” and he said winning 500 games was a testament to “all the great parents and high-character kids.”

Only when the buzzer ended the game did Becker rise and embrace his assistant coaches, Bill Davis and Megan Hasler and Brooke Bisping.

“If it was just about me,” he said later, “it’d be empty.”

As the coach entered his team’s locker room, the Potters were ready. After a morning shoot-out, they had gone shopping at Walmart. “Two bucks each,” senior Courtney Jones said, “we got six confetti poppers.” For those of you who have no clue as to confetti poppers, here’s what it sounds like when a 500-game-winning coach walks into his team’s locker room and the players ambush him with confetti poppers… . . .

BOOM! … BOOM! . . .BOOM!

Six times a BOOM!

Confetti of many colors flies to the ceiling and floats down, a Potterdome ticker-tape parade, all of it coming to rest on the coach’s shoulders. There’s a big poster board drawn up with huzzahs and hoorays – ‘‘BEST COACH EVER!” “500!” And the coach, because of all that coaching DNA, allows himself to say, “Awesome, awesome job,” before saying, “Team up,” meaning everybody come in, and there he says, “Be back here at 5,” because beating Lincoln was the first game of a two-game day and at 5, an hour and a half before a 6:30 tipoff with Galesburg, they would begin work on Bob Becker’s next 500 victories and the next celebration.

Wait one minute. His next 500? I don’t want to wait that long to do better than confetti poppers.

Now is the time to do it and do it right.

Honor the Beckers by naming the court for the coach and his wife.

The Bob & Evelyn Becker Court.

Five hundred wins, four state championships in five years – I’d
say name me one other coach in Illinois history who has done that. But that’s an unfair question. Only Bob Becker has done it.

Bureaucracies have odd rules. I asked the Morton High School athletic director, Scott Jones, if there were a rule against naming the court for Becker. Like, did he have to be old and dead?

“Nothing that I know of,” Jones said. “It’d just be up to the school board.”

Well, to my ears that sounds like a suggestion to all the great parents of past, present, and future Lady Potters that they might want to text/email/snail-mail/call the school board president. His name is Shad Beaty.

Now, the basketball game . . . it was no game . . . the Potters are just too good for ordinarily decent teams . . . and they didn’t have their leading scorer, Lindsey Dullard (out with a concussion, return still undecided), or their sixth man, Raquel Frakes (out with a broken wrist, coming back Jan. 25) . . . they’re so good, in fact, it was 12-0 in fewer than four minutes today and 38-8 at the half.

Two little stories will do. The first illustrates the Potters’ defensive work that so often sets in motion their offense.

As a Lincoln ball-handler moved near the mid-court line, Bob Becker was off the bench shouting at his daughter, “Maddy, force her left, force her left.” The right-handed dribbler was forced left, forced into the low left corner of the court. There Olivia Remmert knocked the ball loose. It rolled to Courtney Jones. Jones sprinted with it the other way before passing to a Potter flying in from the right wing. The hustling Remmert wound up making the bucket. Only fair.

The second story was Peyton Dearing’s story. From 7 a.m. Friday until after 4 p.m., she was in an emergency room. A kidney stone? No one knew, they knew only, as she said, “it was the worst pain ever.” Only morphine stopped the pain. “They think she passed the kidney stone then,” her mother, Erica, said.

Wait. At 4 p.m. Friday, she passed a kidney stone?

And at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, she would play basketball?

Some of us who shall go nameless would have taken a month off, filed for disability, and told the boss to send our mail to the hotel in Bali.

“Peyton will want to play,” Bob Becker said Saturday morning, “and I’d be surprised if she doesn’t.”

Dearing was suited up today. She didn’t start because she didn’t practice Friday.

But with 4:31 to play in the first quarter, she entered the game.

Five seconds later, at 4:26, on a drive down the left side of the lane, she scored on a layup.

She didn’t take a month off. It was five seconds.

Afterwards, I asked how she felt.

“Better,” she said.

Better than what?

Laughing. “Better than yesterday.”

Ah, to be 18 again.

Jones led Morton’s scoring with 13. Dearing, Katie Krupa, and Maddy Becker each had 11. Cailyn Cowley had 4, Makenna Baughman 3, and Remmert 2.

Morton’s Lady Potters 47, Dunlap 17

My sportswriting hero, Red Smith, once said, “God is good, God will provide.” Red meant God would provide the stuff for a daily column. He would help the poor, poor columnist find a way to fill the allotted space. I thought of Red tonight. I needed help.

And here came Fred Remmert, big, burly guy in a flaming red sweater.

The game was over, the Potters having crumbled another cupcake in a game we will mention later, and here came Fred Remmert with a story, Fred being the father of Olivia Remmert, who is a senior guard, a veteran of two state championship teams, and, on this night, a courier chosen by the Potters to deliver a box of Milk Duds to your faithful scribbler..

“I told John Bumgarner this story,” Fred said, and now he told it to me, a story out of his Morton High School days, and I’m listening because I had spent an hour and 15 minutes at a game in which nothing much happened except one team was really really really good and the other one made the mistake of showing up.

Anyway, Fred said, “Back in high school, I talked John’s son, Mark, into coming out for football. And what happens? He took my position – and he went on to get a scholarship to Northwestern. Not that I would have got a scholarship to Northwestern, but I wanted John to know that story.”

Which gives me a chance – filling up space here – to say I, too, have a history with John Bumgarner.

John is the father of one of the Lady Potters’ all-time greats, Cindy Bumgarner, the guest of honor at a Potterdome game last Saturday. For most of the last 30 years, John and his wife, Karin, have been constant presences in the Potterdome, usually sitting at midcourt across from the benches.

So in my Milk Duds era I came to know John at games.

Then one day, four years ago, I got a letter from Deer Creek-Mackinaw’s football coach with a note on an old newspaper clipping: “Thought you’d be interested in this.”

Let’s say it was a clipping from 1960. It was a pre-season high school football story in the Bloomington Daily Pantagraph. I had written it. It was accompanied by a picture I had taken of the Dee-Mac stars, one a quarterback identified as Denny Bumgarner.

I knew John was from Mackinaw. Next time I saw him, I asked if in his day he knew the star quarterback Denny Bumgarner.

“Sure,” he said. “That’s me.”

Middle name: Dennis.

So, a lifetime ago, trying to be a sportswriter while working my way through Illinois Wesleyan University, I took a picture of the guy who rode shotgun with me tonight to Dunlap, where nothing much happened except the unbeaten Potters (7-0 in the Mid-Illini) won their 20th straight game of the season and 499th of Bob Becker’s coaching career with the coach’s daughter, Maddy, outscoring Dunlap by herself with six 3’s, at least one in each quarter.

“They were doubling me,” said Katie Krupa, the Potters’ post, “and that left Maddy open, and she was knockin’ ‘em down.”

“Wide open,” Maddy Becker said, “and my teammates were getting me the ball.” She also had an opinion on the Potters’ defense this night: “Solid.” Well, if solid means impenetrable, yes, the Potters’ defense was solid. Dunlap made one field goal in the first half, that with 20 seconds to play, and trailed at halftime, 18-4. Words fail to describe the futility of Dunlap’s shooters, who may have been frightened by Morton’s fearsome reputation and certainly threw up a lot of frightful shots, including air-ball layups and 3’s that came to earth in distant zip codes.

“Our on-the-ball defense was great,” Bob Becker said. “We played great defense ‘within a yard,’ three feet either side of you.”

The Potters did all this without their leading scorer, Lindsey Dullard, and sixth-man Raquel Frakes. Dullard’s return from a concusion is uncertain; Frakes will play Jan. 25.

“When we get them back,” Becker said, “we can be scary, scary good.”

Rather scary tonight. Against a team that was 12-4 and 5-1 in the conference, they led at the quarter 10-1 and 34-11 after three to create a running-clock fourth quarter.

Maddy Becker led Morton with 18. Krupa had 12, Courtney Jones 6, Peyton Dearing 5, Makenna Baughmana 3 and Sedona McCartney 3.

Wait. As it happens, I have space to fill and here came a man with a white beard. He wore a blue knit seaman’s cap. He said, “I’m Mike Dearing”

I saw a resemblance to Peyton Dearing’s father. So I said, “Are you Robin’s brother?”

“Yes. Five of us Dearings. And Peyton’s the last of us,” he said. “Man, we are having fun.”

Thank you, God.

Morton’s Lady Potters 48, Metamora 32

I don’t want to get all dramatic about it. But why not get all dramatic when this game was all-drama all-intensity all-the-time? So here’s the picture. The Potters’ Peyton Dearing had scored on one of her looking-for-daylight drives. And then she stole the in-bounds pass, only to fall, stretched flat-out face-down on the court. Here came a Metamora player from who knows how far away. She threw herself against Dearing, ker-RASH. In another game, that’s targeting a defenseless receiver, 15 yards, automatic first down. In this game, it was, like, Hey, Peyton, you alive under there?

She was.

“Unfazed,” her coach, Bob Becker, said. Easy for him to say. Not his ribcage.

“It hurt a little bit,” Dearing said, her smile hurting a little bit.

“Got up, scored,” Becker also said.

She did.

She did it four freakin’ seconds later.

It was the Potters’ ball under the hoop. There they improvised a play. Courtney Jones was to in-bounds the ball until she said to Dearing, “Left side, you take it.” The left-handed Dearing could make the pass, step across the baseline on the low left block, take a return, and be wide-open for a left-handed layup.

Al McGuire taught us that some days are seashells and balloons. On those days, life is good. On those days, Peyton Dearing lobs an in-bounds pass to a double-teamed Katie Krupie near the free throw line. Krupa snatches the ball high overhead and immediately snaps it back to Dearing, who, as if materializing from nowhere, even dramatically materializing, simply steps in-bounds for the uncontested layup.

It’s too dramatic to say those plays decided the game.

But, look. They decided the game.

I’ll explain that later. Here I need to quote Bob Becker at a greater length. Perhaps you, even from the cheap seats, heard him this night. For reasons lost in the mists of history, Becker has a thing about Metamora. As much as he wants to win every Mid-Illini Conference game – the streak is at 53 in a row now – he really really really wants to beat Metamora. For 32 minutes, the Hall of Fame, four state-titles-in-five-years coach who now has won 498 games in 20 seasons was coaching as if he had never won a game and might never win a game and might have to go back to being somebody’s fifth assistant defensive secondary coach also in charge of lining the field on game days.

So, tonight, from tip-off to buzzer . . .

“MOVE IT!”

“WHAAAATTT?”

‘HELP SIDE! HELP SIDE, MOVE!”

‘SHE’S HOOKING US! COME ON, HOOKING!!”

“WE’RE STANDING!”

(THE STRONG LEATHERY SOUND OF A FOOT STOMPING)

“GET THAT PASS!”

“LET’S GO, LET’S GO, GO, GO!”

And then there was whatever sweet nothing he laid on the zebra who T’d him up with two minutes to play, Morton leading, 46-27.

“Peyton just got HAMMERED on a drive and he didn’t call it, HAMMERED,” Becker said later. “I don’t even care about the technical. She got HAMMERED and I’m going to defend her.”

Now, back to those game-turning plays . . ..

They came at the end of a 10-minute run. Moving from one point ahead to 14 ahead on its way to 20 up, Morton showed Metamora what would happen the rest of the night. What would happen is the same thing that happens to most people with the idea they can hang with the Potters. They learn they can’t. They can’t because Morton’s offense is so good it almost as good as its defense. Metamora is a good team. It came in with a 13-5 record. Yet it could score only 4 points in the second quarter and 5 in the third. Meanwhile, Morton blew out to a 46-26 lead.

There’s a word for this. Becker had scrawled it on his coach’s whiteboard as a reminder to his players.

RELENTLESS.

That, they are.

Before Dearing was crushed against the floor, she had just scored on a drive. Then she made a steal. Her easy bucket on the ensuing in-bounds play – two layups in four seconds! — was the end of a 12-1 run that gave Morton a 27-14 lead. It’s worth doing play-by-play of that run, for two reasons: 1) good teams find a way to do such sustained work every night out, and 2) the Potters did it without their season’s leading scorer, Lindsey Dullard, who suffered a concussion on a fall when fouled in the first quarter and never returned to the game. (She may miss Tuesday’s game at Dunlap.)

The run started with an Olivia Remmert rebound and coast-to-coast sprint to a layyup. Then came Dearing with a flashing drive around, behind, and through Metamora’s befuddled defenders. She followed with two free throws and Jones came with a floater in the lane. At halftime, then, Morton led, 23-14.

Becker insists that Morton dominate the early play of every third quarter. That’s when Dearing did her two-layups-in-four seconds thing. The Potters ran the score to 38-19 at the third quarter’s end when Dearing, feeling the game come to her, did a catch-and-shoot 3 from the low left corner. “No thinking,” she said, no pain in the smile here. “We all know that with Lindsey out, we’d have to step up. We did. And our defense was stellar tonight.”

Dearing led Morton’s scoring with 18, 12 coming in the second half. Krupa had 11. Maddy Becker’s nine came on 3 3’s. Jones and Dullard had 4 each, Remmert had 2.

Sent from my iPhone

Morton’s Lady Potters 60, East Peoria 17

Courtney Jones moved the basketball smoothly, bouncing it from her right hand to the left, and then between her legs to her right hand again and reversed it to her left and returned it to the front – all this done in less time than it took to type the words.

Her audience loved it.

They loved it because now she let each of them try to do it.

These were the girls of the sixth-grade team from the Morton Heat youth program. This was during the Morton High School’s junior varsity game at the Potterdome tonight. When I say “during” the jayvee game, I mean DURING the game. The girls gathered alongside the bleachers at the stage end of the court, the game going on behind them, the sixth-graders oblivious to anything but the wonder of getting a private ball-handling drill with . . .

Let’s say it this way. Courtney Jones is now a senior in high school, a starter on perhaps the best girls high school team in Illinois, and she still remembers her sixth-grade moments with . . .

“A LADY P0TTER!,” she said. “It was always so cool. I love hanging out with the young ones now. I saw one of them crying, so I wanted to do something with them. Four were sitting down, off by themselves kinda, but pretty soon they were all into it.”

I loved this night. The Potters did basketball the way basketball should be done. “Our kids were comfortable, focused, and dialed-in at both ends,” their coach, Bob Becker, said. After six Christmas holiday games on the road, he said “it was good to be back in the Potterdome.”

Good heavens, it was 33-0 early in the second quarter. All five Morton starters had scored, on 3-pointers, on steals, on fast breaks, all done with textbook precision, every bucket coming off an assist as clever as it was necessary. Thinking here of that moment Maddy Becker, of all the short people, found herself with a rebound on the low right block and, acutely aware she was covered up by big people, knew better than to go back up with it, and so she somehow lobbed a pass over those big people to her own big, Lindsey Dullard, on the low left block for a layup.

After which, coming downcourt, Maddy Becker just smiled at the way good things sometimes happen.

I loved all the smiling tonight, such as with 1.1 seconds to play in the first half.

Potters ball at midcourt.

Courtney Jones waiting near the jump circle to take the in-bounds pass.

She looks at Bob Becker on the bench. Her eyes say, “Can I, huh? Can I, please? Oh, I want to,yes, I do.”

Her eyes say all that. I hear it.

Becker sees that East Peoria is nowhere near Jones. He nods toward the Potters end. Jones hears the coach say, “Of course!”

So she lets the in-bounds pass bounce once, moving her a foot or two past the midcourt line, where she puts up the 40-footer which is in the air as the buzzer sounds and it looks good . . .

“I would not have been surprised if she made it,” Becker said, because she has done it in a real game (the Fremb miracle a year ago!) and has done it in practice to earn a second chance in the team’s shooting contests.

Only it’s a little too much of a line drive, it hits the board too hard, and while it rattles the rim, it bounces away – and you’d never know it judging by the incandescent smile on Jones’s face, one more proof of the fun these Lady Potters are having right now.

Have I mentioned Peyton Dearing’s voice?

Courtney Jones did when I asked what was so funny that the team broke its huddle entering the second half with laughter that caused Bob Becker to join in?

“Peyton has this voice that she does,” Jones explained. “She was doing it and trying to get Coach to do it.”

Investigative reporter that I am, I investigated.

“Peyton,” I said, “the voice?”

“A bunch of us were at my house before the game,” she said, “and we got to doing this voice. Not really a voice that said words. More a sound, y’know? Abby (Steider) started it. Coach kinda looked at us. He didn’t do it.” After Dearing’s reluctant voicing of the voice, how I’d describe the voice is, it’s Homer Simpson gargling.

Anyway, you get the drift . . . a fun night . . . undefeated defending state champions now 18-0 against East Peoria 3-16.

Oh, and there was Maddy Becker again, Maddy Becker who made 4 3-pointers, Maddy Becker who late in the third quarter put up a beautiful shot from 22 feet out, a shot that sailed beautifully, the only problem being that it flew 21 feet.

After which, she looked over at her buddies on the bench and smiled at the way bad things sometimes happen.

Yes, a smiling night. The Potters are now on a 28-game winning streak counting last season. They’ve won 52 straight Mid-Illini Conference games. Over the last 5 ½ seasons, they’re 182-13 with four state championships. A fifth is the goal this season. And why not – on a smiling night, I ask why not — why not just do the thing? Why not go 36-0? Why not go undefeated?

Becker and Dullard led Morton’s scoring with 14 each. Katie Krupa had 9, Jones 8, Dearing 7, Maggie Hobson 6, and Makenna Baughman 2.

January 7, 2020: “This blog is contagious”

Morton’s Lady Potters 57, Limestone 29

It wasn’t near that close. The undefeated Potters made the woebegone Rockets their 17th victim. The less we say about the game, the better. Because whatever’s “going around,” I got it. I am warning you, dear readers. This blog is contagious. You might want to back away from your PC or iPhone or whatever device you have in hand. I sat two rows behind the Potters’ bench tonight and later I told the coach, Bob Becker, “I gutted it out tonight.” Meaning I held my breath for the full hour and 15 minutes so as not to spread onto his players whatever I’ve got that’s “going around.”

A cold?

Flu?

Whatever I’ve got, it caused me to fall asleep in my parked car at 10:06 this morning. Wonder is, no one reported a vagrant sleeping in the Restmor nursing home parking lot. I was home at noon and I went to bed and there tried to remember the name of that magic potion for queasy stomachs.

“It’s pink,” I told myself.

So I crawled out of bed, my bones aching in the manner of Becky Jones’s hipbone, and I searched the master bath medicine closet.

Green stuff. Red stuff. A ghastly purple goo.

But no pink.

In bed I also considered an adult question.

“Why,” I asked myself, “am I risking my health and the health of innocent by-standers who might mistake me for a reasoning adult and want to share air space with me?”

“Look,” I answered myself, “the Lady Potters could win this one playing barefoot,” at which point I heard myself say, “Gut it out, Kindred. They lose this one, it’s historic. You gotta be there.”

Stupid, you bet. Tomorrow, bed all day, all night.

So, out of bed at 4 o’clock this afternoon and en route to the game, I called my sister, Sandra, who knows everything about running a household.

“That pink stuff, what is it?” I asked.

“Pepto-Bismol,” she said, which caused me to stop at a Shell station where I asked the woman behind the counter, “You selling much Pepto-Bismol?” She said, “No. But I hear something’s going around. That’ll be $6.05.”

There at the gas pump, I unscrewed the pink stuff, took a swig, and headed for Limestone High School for What Had as Much Chance of Being an Historic Game as I Had of Standing In for Brad Pitt.

At Limestone, I stopped at the concession counter and asked my buddy John Bumgarner for advice.

“Would 7-UP be good for me?” I said.

“I think so,” he said, with less than the authoritative tone Sandy uses.

I said to the woman behind the counter, “I don’t see any 7-UP. What do you have that’s like 7-UP?

“Sierra Mist,” she said.

“If I throw up,” I said pleasantly, “I’ll blame you.”

She laughed, as if she thought I was kidding.

Well, I am here to report that Sierra Mist is not 7-UP but it got me through the soporific first half without incident, though the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is that I was rooting for a running-clock game. I wanted to get out of the Vernon Woosley Gymnasium and into the Dave Kindred Bed.

Imagine my distress then in the first quarter.

The clock operator had not turned on the clock.

I heard myself shouting down to assistant coach Bill Davis, “Clock’s not running.” He might have thought I cared about the game’s purity. I cared only about getting time to move more quickly, not freakin’ stand still.

It was 34-19 at halftime. By the end of the third quarter, it was 51-23.

Please, somebody, make it 30 points.

Thank you, Lindsey Dullard. Her layup at 7:21 of the fourth quarter put the Potters up, 54-23.

The adolescent in me made a note, “Night’s Most Important Basket.” I also pumped a fist in silent celebration, for soon it was 8:15 p.m, and the game was over and I could see that a day that began with me asleep in my car now would now end with me back home typing these words as fast as my aching fingers – does flu make your fingers ache? – can type.

Now, one more swig of the pink stuff and good night.

Dullard led Morton’s scoring with 13, and Katie Krupa had 11. Courtney Jones, who had a bunch of rebounds and assists (we’ll get the number tomorrow), had 8 points. Peyton Dearing scored 7, Cailyn Cowley 6, Olivia Remmert 4, Makenna Baughman 3, Claire Reiman 3, and Abby Steider 2.

Morton’s Lady Potters 48, Peoria High 42

Enough of these TESTS, already….I myself am ready to relax…in the last couple weeks, the Potters have played teams with records of 8-0, 12-0, 13-2, 14-1, 14-2, and 13-2…..this is Finals Week every stinkin’ day!….it’s calculus followed by biology and astronomy (is there such a class?) before enduring Advanced Placement English Lit (“Please, Ms. Dearing, recite Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXIX”)….so the Potters are a wonderful 16-0, but still, my head’s gonna explode if they don’t have a cupcake soon!!

I peeked at the schedule.

At Limestone next.

Then, in the Potterdome, East Peoria.

I feel so much better now.

Much, much better than I felt going into tonight’s fourth quarter with Peoria High leading, 39-34, and seeming to have mastered the sort of game plan that always gives the Potters fits. It’s built on speed at both ends. Offensively, it’s devil-to-the-hindmost, rapid-fire movement interrupted only by unexpected 3-point tries. It’s relentless attack on defense, hands everywhere, bodies bumping ball-handlers, daring any and all to make a lazy pass or let her hands go soft on the ball. Afterwards, talking to Potters’ point guard Courtney Jones, I characterized the Peoria defense as “clawing and scratching,” causing Jones to touch the tip of her nose and say, “I have a scratch right here.”

Going into that fourth quarter, Peoria had come from behind six times to take the lead against the defending state champion Potters – no small feat, considering that the Potters had trailed in the fourth quarter only twice all season. It’s not that Morton had played poorly; let’s call it mediocre by its high standards. More important, let’s say Peoria was “motivated, determined, and hungry,” to quote the Morton coach, Bob Becker, and, to quote Peoria’s Meechie Edwards, “We came ready to go.”

What we saw, then, was a fabulous girls high school basketball game — “These games are FUN!” the Potters’ Katie Krupa said — as much fun as they get for a player, not so much for the old folks holding their breath for an hour and 15 minutes.

Both teams had big runs early in the second half. Morton opened with a 9-0 run to take a 30-25 lead midway in the third quarter.

But Peoria ended the quarter on a 12-2 run for its 39-34 lead going into the fourth.

By then, it seemed clear the only question was: Who’s going to make the last big run?

A suggestion of the answer came quickly. It came in the first 28 seconds of the fourth when Morton’s Peyton Dearing made a 3-pointer from the top of the arc.

A second suggestion came 31 seconds later. It came at Morton’s defensive end. A Peoria ball-handler, befuddled, chose to walk with the ball.

And less than a minute later, here came Dearing again, now with the ball on a string, another of her left-handed drives that gets past idling defenders and to the rim in a flash, this time for a layup that tied it at 39.

No one can say what the Peorians were thinking then. But anyone can say what they think the Peorians were thinking. And I’m thinking the Peorians were thinking, “OMG, here they come.” Because, look at what the Peorians did on their next three offensive possessions: 1) an air-ball layup that a rebounder thought to put back and somehow stuck it BEHIND the glass on the hoop supports, 2) a second air-ball layup, after which the coach, Edwards, at a timeout, walked halfway across the court to tell a player, in essence, Dear, dear, dear, please, pretty please, don’t do that again (or words to that effect), and 3) yet a third air-ball layup, another eyes-closed prayer that meant the Peorians had not scored in the first 3:30 of the quarter.

Finally, giving up on out-of-control drives, they threw up a prayerful 3-pointer that went in. They led, 42-39, with 4:27 to play – after which it was all Morton. Becker would say, “Our kids have got that champion’s DNA,” and they proved it when it mattered most.

We saw it first in Dearing. Against Peoria’s pestiferous defenders who all seemed to have four hands slapping at the ball, Dearing worked with the ball on the dribble forever – or 15 seconds, whichever came first – before noticing daylight down the left side of the lane. There she did her DNA thing.

“I saw I could go,” she said. “And when nobody came from the help side, I just kept going.”

Suddenly running free, Dearing dropped in a layup to bring Morton within a point, 42-41, with 3:10 to play.

That caused Peoria to call timeout. Edwards had long since suspected the roof falling in. “We know who Morton is,” he would say later.

During that timeout, on the Morton bench, Becker looked at Dearing and said, “You’re not going to let her catch it.” He meant Dearing was to make life miserable for the Peoria girl who had made that 3 a minute earlier. Spoiler alert: that girl touched the ball once after that. With Dearing “in her shorts,” as the coaches say so inelegantly and so wonderfully, that girl on that one touch was called for traveling.

Meanwhile, here’s what Morton did from 42-41 down with three minutes to play. It gave the ball to Maddy Becker a step outside the 3-point arc on the right side. For anyone seeing Morton for the first time this season, giving the ball to Becker there might have seemed a misguided idea. She was, at that point, 0-for-5 on 3’s.

But who else do you want shooting a 3 in the last 3 minutes if not a shooter who’s shooting 50 percent on 3’s for the year?

“Keep shooting,” the coach Becker would say, and the shooter Becker kept shooting.

Bang!

Now Morton led, 44-42, with 2:50 to play and Peoria was done. If it even got another shot, I have no note of it.

Morton’s last four points came on another Dearing layup (with her 16 second-half points, she gets an A+ on this test, never mind if she even heard of Sonnet XXIX) followed by two Lindsey Dullard free throws when fouled on a breakaway layup with a steal in the last 25 seconds.

Dearing’s 16 led Morton’s scoring. Krupa, a force early with 10 first-half points, had 14. Dullard had 9, Jones 4, Maddy Becker 3, and Olivia Remmert 2.

The 2019-20 Morton Lady Potters have passed every test so far through the first 15 games of the season. Winning Championships at the Morton Thanksgiving Tournament & the State Farm Holiday Classic, these Lady Potters have done something that no other Lady Potter team has done in recorded history.  At least that I can find during the Coach Becker era.  That is in being undefeated on January 1st.

As Good as Last Year?
Through this point last year, the Lady Potters were 15-2 and were averaging 61 points per game as a team and allowing 39 points per game.  This year, on January 1st, they are 15-0 and are averaging 65 points per game  and allowing 40 points per game.  So their point differential this year is actually 3 points better than last year, but that doesn’t tell the entire story.

The Lady Potters faced some very good teams in the Nov-Dec stretch of both last season and this season.  Some of players I asked said they think last year’s schedule may have been a little tougher, playing teams like Kentucky-Ryle, Richwoods 2x, Wisconsin-Monroe and Chicago Simeon last year during the first two months. However, they have played some very good teams this year as well in Chicago Marist, Richwoods, Lincoln-Way West, Sycamore and East St. Louis.  So the strength of schedule is up for debate, but pretty close, if you ask me.

There are a few more differences though, between this year’s team and last year’s.  This year the Lady Potters are much more balanced in their scoring attack, with 6 different players leading scoring in the first 15 games. All of last year’s returning players have accepted new roles and different responsibilities and this Senior laden team is leaning on it’s experience to lead the way.

University of Alabama-Birmingham signee, Lindsey Dullard, has been exceptional in every category, and leads the team in rebounding and scoring, but has plenty of help from her teammates and has been more than willing to share the ball and the spot light.  Illinois Central College signee, Courtney Jones has transitioned well to the point guard spot this year for the Potters and has been putting up very good all-around numbers, leading the team in assists and steals and has the second most rebounds on the team through 15 games. Both players are also very smart, defensive minded players that always put the team first. These two Senior Captains have played in every Lady Potter game and practice and since joining the Lady Potters as freshmen.

Senior shooting guards Maddy Becker and Peyton Dearing have been absolutely deadly from the perimeter this year, with the duo averaging 54% (52-96) from the arc.  Dearing, an Illinois State University Soccer signee, has also utilized her speed very well this year on both ends of the court and is playing with great confidence right now.  She has made a major impact this season on the hardwood.  Becker (Captain), a returning starter from last year’s State Champion team, that had her season ended last year due to a knee injury in the Sectional Semi-Final vs Canton, is leading the team in made 3’s and brings with her a wealth of experience, toughness and basketball smarts.

Sophomore Katie Krupa & Junior Raquel Frakes have been imposing forces in the post, with Katie shooting a team leading 61% from the field and 2nd on the team in points scored.  Katie can dominate in the post and is just scratching the surface of how good she can be for the Potters.  Raquel has been a dynamic rebounder and defender.  Her bounce and athleticism allow the Potters to do things most teams can’t.  Raquel leads the team in Offensive rebounds and has a jaw dropping vertical.  Raquel injured her wrist in the Championship Semi-final game vs Lincoln-Way West, when big Brianna Woolridge fell on top of her.  Raquel is likely to miss a couple of weeks of play before returning. Get well soon Raquel!

Other regulars, returning from last year’s State Championship team, that have provided valuable minutes for the Lady Potters include Seniors Olivia Remmert (Captain) and Makenna Baughman.  Both players are workhorses that play their roles very well. Whether it’s setting the screen that allows their teammate the time to get the shot off, pulling down the big rebound, getting the deflection or tie-up for extra possessions or hitting the big shot themselves.  Olivia and Makenna have been excellent in their roles and maximum effort team players.

By The Numbers
The Lady Potters have been dominant as a team this year and all 16 players have definitely contributed to the success.  Some teams stats of interest through the first 15 games:

494 – Coach Becker has won 494 games as head coach of the Lady Potters

113 – The Class of 2020 has won 113 Varsity games (lost 7)

100% – The Class of 2020 has won 100% of their Mid-Illini Conference games (45-0)

82% – The Lady Potters are shooting 82% as a team from the free throw line (179-217)

51% – The Lady Potters are shooting 51% as a team from the field (346-680)

50 – The Lady Potters have won 50 straight Mid-Illini Conference games in a row

25/23/17/8 – The Lady Potters are averaging 25 Rebounds, 23 Field Goals, 17 Assists, and 8 Steals as a team

15 – The Lady Potters have 15 consecutive Wins to start the season

2 – The Lady Potters have won 2 tournament Championships this season (Morton Thanksgiving Tournament & the State Farm Holiday Classic).

1 – The Lady Potters are ranked #1 in the State by the AP Sportswriters

What the Players Have to Say
I had the opportunity to sit down and ask a few questions from some of the Lady Potters (Frakes, Dearing & Jones) regarding their superstitions/habits & goals.  Let me just say, these three are very superstitious.

Superstitions –

1. All 3 have to park in the same spot before every game or they have a bad game
2. Peyton & Raquel have to hum the National Anthem before each game
3. Courtney needs a white hair tie & fist bump everyone
4. Raquel has to straighten her hair on game days
5. Peyton has to make sure she has no nail polish on
6. There are apparently many more that probably shouldn’t be mentioned here

Goals – 

1. Courtney says going undefeated in the Mid-Illini Conference all 4 years
2. All three say getting back to Redbird and winning State
3. Peyton says going undefeated all season
4. Courtney “1 game at a time!”

Don Pyles Photographs –