Morton’s Lady Potters 68, Chicago Marist 51

Chicago Marist was trying. It’s a very good basketball team. It had won 14 of 16 games against top-flight competition. Absolutely, the Redhawks wanted to score. They were down 52-43 and needed to make something happen on that first possession of the fourth quarter.

So they did this and they did that and they went low and came out high and they threw it across court and they dribbled hither and yon and one or two of them thought to look at the rim only to avert their eyes because they knew there was no way to get near it.

This went on.

And on.

It went on for a minute and 10 seconds, which is an eternity when you’re down nine points in the championship game of the State Farm Holiday Classic. To get nothing done then is to surrender.

And it was then that the hundreds of Morton fans in the Illinois Wesleyan University arena made the kind of noise you don’t often hear at a basketball game.

The fans started cheering – for defense. They actually applauded – for defense. Every time a Potters’ defender denied an entry pass or forced a dribbler out of her lane or persuaded a ball-handler it was more fun to NOT have the ball than to have Potters making your life miserable – yes, whatever Marist wanted to do on that offensive possession, the Potters defenders said, “Nah, not here, not now, not tonight, not ever,” and the fans loved every great-defense moment of it.

When the Redhawks finally just flung the leather thing into the air – not a prayer as much as a brick – the Potters came downcourt quickly, the quickest of them, the little left-handed guard Peyton Dearing, finding a spot a half-step outside the arc on the right side, the ball coming to her there, and . . .

Bang!

Dearing’s 3-pointer made it 55-43, and it caused me to scratch one word in my notebook.

Over.

Down by 10 points early, the Potters were on their way to a 17-point lead. They would win their 15th game without defeat, their 25th in a row reaching into last season. They would win the State Farm tournament for the second time in school history, an accomplishment that came with some apprehension among superstitious types. That’s because the Potters have won the state’s Class 3A championship in four of the last five seasons – failing to win it all only in that 2017-18 season when they won the big, beautiful golden ball trophy that State Farm gives its champions.

So, winning tonight is a bad thing?

No, no, no, certainly no if you ask Peyton Dearing.

“We’re gong to break the ‘curse,’” she said. “We won here and we’re going to win the State.”

And why not? Look, tonight they were on the wrong end of a 15-0 run that helped Marist to a 25-15 lead early in the second quarter. They were being beaten by transition fast breaks and 3’s. Even with their all-stater Sidney Affolter making only one field goal, the Chicagoans seemed to have Morton in trouble. (Speaking of defense, the Potters held Affolter to that one bucket and seven free throws. She’d scored 27 in the Marist victory over Richwoods. Lindsey Dullard and Courtney Jones did most of that defensive work with help from all hands in the area. It was a beautiful thing to see.)

Say again, a curse? Not really. The Potters demonstrated in this tournament that they are not only a good team, they KNOW they’re a good team. Ten points down? Big deal. It’s early. Pay attention, folks, they’ll be making a comeback shortly. It may be born of Dullard’s court sense. It was Jones defending against Affolter in Marist’s 70 Seconds Without a Clue. Dearing had ended the third quarter with a sprint for a curled-in layup. Then Katie Krupa took over with a pair of layups off nifty passes by Jones and Dullard to make it 59-45, four minutes to play, turn out the lights, the party’s over.

Once down by 10, now up by 14, Morton had outscored one of Class 4A’s best teams, 44-20, in 18 minutes. The Marist coach, Mary Pat Connolly, said, “We lost twice coming in, to Benet Academy and Chicago Simeon. Morton may be better than either of them. Their two bigs – Dullard and Krupa – were too much for us. And they had those two 3-point shooters – Becker and Dearing. Morton-Benet would be a great game.”

Morton’s coach, Bob Becker, loved his team tonight and said so, rarely pausing for breath between observations on its excellence: “We’re a great team . . . this is a gritty, tough group . . . resilient . . . awesome . . . kids stepped up . . . they’ve embraced every challenge.”

He suggested a new challenge.

“I think that only six times anybody has won the State Farm and won the State, too,” he said. “That’ll be their goal now.”

That said, he also said the CoachSpeak thing.

“We don’t want to push the fast-forward button,” he said. “We’ve got to keep working hard every day.”

Krupa led Morton’s scoring with 19. Dearing had 17, Dullard 16. Jones adnd Maddy Becker each had 6, Makenna Baughman and Maggie Hobson each had 2.

Morton Lady Potter Christmas Video 2019 –

 

 

Morton’s Lady Potters 69, Lincoln-Way West 62

For so long floating above the clouds, the Potters came to earth tonight. For a month, they had made every game a piece of basketball art, beautiful at both ends. Not so much tonight. All those 3’s they’re used to making? All those seamless, flowing plays that end in thrilling buckets? Not tonight. Those defenders so steadfast all season? Missing in action.

“We weren’t perfect by any means,” the coach, Bob Becker, said. He might have noted fundamental mistakes, such as two violations for parking your butt in the lane more than three seconds. He might have noted that the Potters gave the losers’ outstanding 3-point shooters too much room too many times. He might have noted that his 3-point shooters, for too long tonight, couldn’t hit the ocean from the side of a rowboat.

Instead of all that, Becker said, “But our kids found a way.”

The undefeated, No. 1-seeded Potters, the defending state 3A champions, found a way to win for the 14th time this season. They found a way to get into the championship game of the State Farm Holiday Classic. They found a way to come from behind in the fourth quarter for the first time all season. And they did it against a 4A team that came in with a 14-1 record built on speed, shooting, a pesky zone defense, and two big people who owned the offensive paint.

All that said, this W was no small accomplishment. Even stuttering and sputtering, for too long bearing no resemblance to the freewheeling Potters who had won their last eight games on running clocks, they move on to the championship game knowing that they had been tested thoroughly by a very good team and survived.

They might have worried that there was no end to the inevitable off-night that every good team suffers. “Nothing was falling for us,” the little guard Peyton Dearing said.

She changed that.

Dear readers of long memory may remember Dearing from a blog done two days ago. Then she told us her shooter’s thoughts after a game in which she made back-to-back 3’s, bang-bang, and decided to pass on a third one. She just had too much time to think, she said.. If she thought she’d make it, for instance, she’d miss it. So she gave the ball to someone else, smiling all the while.

Well.

Such thoughts are OK in running-clock games. Up 40, it’s all tickles and grins.

Not so much tonight.

Not when Lincoln-Way West took a 42-41 lead into the fourth quarter.

The worry for Morton was not that it was a point down. The worry was its shooting. Without seeing any official statistics, I would guess that Morton had made 4 of its first 20 3-point attempts – and this is a team with three starters shooting 50 percent or better on 3’s. If they were to find a way, they needed to change that. “We need to keep oiur shooters shooting,” Becker said later.

So, nine seconds into the quarter, the ball came to Dearing on the arc’s high right side.

She’s a shooter. No thinking now. She shoots it.

Bang!

Dearing’s 3 not only gave the Potters the lead at 44-42, it ignited a stretch of familiar brilliance that produced a game-turning 11-0 run in 2 minutes and 8 seconds.

And Dearing was its beating heart.

Twenty-three seconds later, Raquel Frakes swiped the ball from an unsuspecting Lincoln-Way West player. When I say “swiped,” that’s another way of saying what Frakes would say later: “I pick-pocketed her.” As the ball rolled loose, Dearing fielded it, took one look downcourt, saw Frakes sprinting ahead, and hit her with a long pass for a layup.

One minute later, another Dearing 3 from the right side.

Bang!

Then, 32 seconds later, after Lindsey Dullard blocked a Lincoln-Way West shot under the hoop, Morton came downcourt flying, now on a mission to set the world to spinning properly again, and who does the ball find?

Dearing. On the left side. “Now I’m thinking, ‘I gotta make it, I gotta make it,’” she said.

Bang!

After which the poor people from Chicagoland called timeout, and the Potters walked to their bench, Dearing weary, happy for the breather, stoic, as if nothing much had happened, as if she hadn’t made three 3’s bang-bang-bang, until Becker reached out to slap her hand, giving her license to smile a little as she reached the bench.

Now Morton led, 52-42, soon led by 14 (having outscored the losers 23-6 in the game’s most important 6 minutes), and never led by fewer than 7. In the final, frantic minutes, winning the way that championship teams win, the Potters made 13 of 17 free throws to stave off any rally by the losers.

The Potters had found a way.

Dullard led Morton’s scoring with 18, nine in the first quarter. Dearing had 14, 11 in the fourth quarter. Courtney Jones also had 14, Katie Krupa 13, Frakes 8, and Maddy Becker 2.

Morton’s Lady Potters 79, Geneseo 48

My notebook is full of “Dull” does this, “Dull” does that, “Dull” being Lindsey Dullard, Lindsey Dullard never dull, Dullard being five kinds of sensational tonight, and six kinds if we count cheerleading, which we do because after scoring 28 points in about a half, the 6-foot-1 senior all-stater walked the length of the Lady Potters bench slapping hands with teammates before taking a seat, her smile lighting up the arena.

Had she ever before scored 28?

“Not that I know of,” she said.

Even in grade school?

“Nope.”

Look at the notes, all in the first quarter: Dull steals. Dull FT, Dull 3 left c, Dull driving, Dull LU, Dull 3 left c, Dull LU, Frakes off Dull pass, KK pass to Dull LU, Dull 16 pts . . .

Thing is, it looked easy. It looked easy the way the good ones make the hard stuff look easy. It looked more than easy, it looked inevitable. Every time Dullard touched the ball, she would score. That, or she’d make a pass that only she saw – only she saw Katie Krupa flying ahead of the pack, only she saw a way to get the ball from mid-court to Krupa a step away from a layup while everyone else, mostly Geneseo players, watched her do what only she saw could be done.

The further thing is, it was 28 points on its way to 50. Dullard had 16 in the first quarter, 23 in the half, 28 two minutes into the third quarter – at which point Morton led, 66-24, game over, case closed, mercy declared, time for Dullard to take a smiling seat.

The quarter-final victory in the State Farm Holiday Classic gave the undefeated Potters their 13th victory and moved them into Saturday night’s semis against New Lenox Lincoln Way-West. Counting last season, the defending state 3A champions have won 23 straight games.

Wait. On Dullard, did I say five ways of sensational?

1) As long has been Dullard’s habit, she nailed three 3’s, all from the left side…2) after a summer’s work adding a powerful weapon to her offense, she showed it off tonight by weaving her way through crowds for driving layups finished with either hand…3) she stole passes she had no business reaching and helped shut down Geneseo’s inside offense . . . 4) the team’s leading rebounder all season, she ripped them down with a strongman’s authority again tonight…and 5) she made those passes that no one else imagined, the one to Krupa a beauty and the best a pass to a sliver of daylight with Peyton Dearing waiting to finish a fast break.

“I love making those passes,” Dullard said. “My teammates are running the floor hard and I love getting the ball to them.”

If the ultimate test of a player is what Michael Jordan always said it was – does he make his teammates better? – Lindsey Dullard’s performance tonight was one more piece of evidence that she has lifted the Potters to a month-long streak of exceptional play.

Look, Geneseo was no bunch of stiffs. Like Morton, it was undefeated in 12 games. But, alas, alack, and sad to say for the Geneseoans, some 12-0 records are better than others, as Morton proved in the first 32 seconds tonight.

Twelve seconds in, Maddy Becker’s 3 announced the Potters’ intent. Twenty seconds later, Dullard’s interception of a cross-court pass and sprint for a layup-and-one pretty much sealed the deal, psychically if not emperically.

Soon enough, relentless at both ends as always, the Potters went on a 14-0 run for a 24-6 lead in only six minutes of play. At that rate, Morton wins, 127-32. It still seemed like a game – well, not really, but play along with me – when Morton’s lead was 35-16 midway in the second quarter.

But at 3:40 Krupa scored on a layup to send Morton on an 18-5 run for a 53-21 lead at the half.

My favorite moment in that run was a Dullard moment, of course. Driving from the left side, she somehow threw an airball off the glass. But she caught it on the other side and put it back in. So the stats would show her with two shots and a rebound and two points, all in one move. (For the game, 11 of 14 shooting.)

Well, let’s call it my second-favorite moment. At the buzzer, Dullard threw in a three from the left corner, as if to show, again, that the Potters play every second of every minute of every quarter of every game.

Afterwards, I asked the Geneseo coach, Scott Hardison, what he thought of the Potters.

“I’ll give you the backstory first,” he said.

He’s in his eighth season as the Geneseo coach, and he’s had success, some 20-victory seasons, but not success of the Potters’ state-trophies kind. He called Bob Becker and asked if he could drive down to Peoria and take the Potters’ coach to dinner. You pick the place, Hardison said, I’ll buy.

They wound up at Tyroni’s Pizza in Bartonville. There Hardison asked, in essence, how is it done, how do you build a program that succeeds at the highest levels?

“Bob was very generous.” Hardison said. “He went through his entire history, the Tracy Pontius teams and on, and that’s the kind of program that we want. In Class 3A basketball, Morton is the model. We’re still building toward that.”

As for this Morton team, Hardison said, “You’ve got the two D-1 players (Dullard, Krupa) who can score inside and out. Courtney Jones is the glue that holds them all together. They’ve got the little left-handed guard who beats you (Dearing), and you’ve got Bob’s daughter, Maddy, who’ll make 3’s all day. And you’ve got the kid from Lewistown (Frakes) who can jump out of the building. And if you somehow stop them inside, they get it out to one of their seven shooters.

“Defensively, they’re great. I saw them play Bloomington here the other night, and I saw video of their Sycamore game last week. They played different defenses in both those games — and tonight they played another defense against us. We couldn’t run anything we normally run.

“And they never stop. Late in the second quarter, we were winded and so were they. But Bob came out on the floor and shouted at his kids, ‘They’re tired – and we’re NOT.’ And his kids believed it.”

The coach then said, “We’re looking forward to getting another chance with them, we’re likely to be in the same sectional.”

“Really?” I said. “You want them again?” (Morton made 28 of its first 37 shots tonight. It’s first six players were 31 for 41.)

Hardison almost smiled. “It’ll be a measuring stick for us.”

Dullard’s 28 led Morton. Becker had 12, Dearing 11, Frakes 10, Krupa 8, Jones 6, Maggie Hobson 2, Cailyn Cowley 2.

Morton’s Lady Potters 64, Bloomington 17

Ah, sweet spring. ‘Twas 65 degrees right after noon today. I thought, “Just another sunscreen-lathering day in the heartland. San Diego, eat your heart out. Suddenly we’re Florida, only without alligators.” An hour earlier, as I watched the Lady Potters do their Lady Potters thing, I thought – actually, I said it out lout – “Shoot it.”

Yea, verily, we had the best of two worlds on this day after Christmas. No blizzards, no ice, no below-zero temps. And indoors we had basketball – the first round of the State Farm Holiday Classic, which is where I heard myself advise Peyton Dearing, “Shoot it.”

The little guard had made two 3-pointers in 33 seconds, bang-bang, one from the low left corner, one from high on the right. And, next thing you know, 18 seconds later, the ball was in her hot hand again.

Unguarded again.

Looking at the rim.

Tempted.

But she didn’t shoot.

She even smiled as she passed to Maddy Becker, who made a 3 of her own.

So a girl makes two 3’s in 30 seconds and the ball comes back to her – what’s her thinking?

“I said to Maddy, like, I make them if I’m not thinking about making them and I miss them if I’m thinking about making them . . .”

On hearing that thought, the old sportswriter waited for elaboration and Ms. Dearing added helpfully, “I was thinking about making another one, so I thought, ‘I can’t shoot it, I can’t shoot it.’”

Well, ok. But I, from the far end of the building, had advised her, “Shoot it,” and now her coach, Bob Becker, leaned into our conversation to say, “Don’t think, just shoot it,” because, as an old shooter himself, he believes in keeping the hot hand hot until it goes cold.

Anyway, Dearing’s back-to-back 3’s provided a nice moment as the Potters’ raised their season record to 12-0 and took the first step toward ending The State Farm Superstition.

In the last five seasons, the Potters have won the State Farm tournament one time. That was the only year of those five that they didn’t win the State Class 3A state championship. Thus, the superstition: Win the State Farm, lose the State.

I am here to say not to fret. The way the Potters played today, they’ll will win both State Farm and State.

This game was no test. The Potters are seeded No. 1 in the large-school bracket and Bloomington No. 16. Still, the Potters did to Bloomington what they were supposed to do. Before tipoff, one expert was outrageous in his prediction: “Morton wins, 78-12.” Well, 64-17 is proof enough that the Potters are playing at an exceptionally high level that makes outrageous predictions reasonable.

They led 9-4 after four minutes.

They then scored 32 straight points in 11 minutes and 23 seconds and led at halftime 41-6. Three quarters, it was 56-11.

Their defense was formidable, their offense unstoppable.

Somewhere in there, bored by the beautiful work upon beautiful work at both ends, I decided to write about two things: 1) the Dearing episode, and 2) what was the oddest Christmas gift a Potter received?

Assistant coach Megan Hasler asked around and reported to me, “A mannequin head. Talk to Abby Steider.”

Abby Steider is a 5-foot-10 senior, a volleyball player until this season when she added basketball to her resume for the first time since eighth grade.

An old sportswriter may put a lot of questions to a lot of people for a lot of years without ever once asking what I asked Abby Steider, which was, “A mannequin head?”

“It comes with long, straight hair,” she said. “It’s a ginger. I call her ‘Cinnamon.’ She comes with utensils, too. My mom gave it to me for Christmas because I want to be a cosmetologist.”

About here, Steider’s red-headed teammate Raquel Frakes walked by and said, “She should’ve named it Raquel the Second.”

Morton will play undefeated Geneseo, the 9th seed, at 4 o’clock Friday at Normal Community High School.

Lindsey Dullard led Morton’s scoring today with 14. Maddy Becker had 10, Courtney Jones 8, Katie Krupa 8, Dearing 8, Sedona McCartney 6, Olivia Remmert 4, Makenna Baughman 4, and Cinnamon Raquel 2.

Morton’s Lady Potters 76, Sycamore 54

It’s not true that I’m writing tonight’s blog just so we can print that picture of the young Bob Becker.

But, really.

Has anybody ever been that young?

Look at him, in the gold-lettered jersey of Sycamore High School.

He’s a freshman there. So he’s 15.

“He looked like he was 17,” Lynn Rudin once said of the Becker who came to work in Morton in 1993, then 24 years old. He’d never heard of the Pumpkin Capital of the World (poor kid) when he attended a job fair at the University of Illinois and came away as an elementary physical education teacher, assistant varsity baseball coach and freshman-sophomore coach on Rudin’s girls high school staff. “And,” Rudin said, “he still looks like he’s 17.”

Only now Becker is 50 and in 20 seasons as the Potters’ head coach his teams have won 490 games – 11-0 this season, on a 21-game winning streak carried over from last year. And his Potters are on a history-making run of four Class 3A state championships in the last five seasons.

Not bad for the perpetual youngster who sat in his Potterdome office this afternoon and remembered his own high school basketball career at Sycamore on fair-to-middling teams. He said, “As a junior, I was the sixth man – and sometimes I didn’t get in games.” As a senior, he became Sycamore’s co-MVP, an off-guard averaging “about 11 points a game, on seven or eight shots a game, pretty efficient.” Here he brightened up. “If we’d had a slick guard who could penetrate and dish out,” he said, “I could’ve made a LIVING at that.”

Ah, memories.

Such as the night he had 12 points at halftime, only to sit out most of the second half.

“I don’t know why the coach took me out, but he did,” Becker said, still a touch burned. “All I know is I wasn’t tired. Like the other night. Peyton Dearing was on FIRE for us. I wanted her shooting. You don’t get tired when you’re shooting and making them.”

So it was old-home night, sort of, when Sycamore’s girls made a two-hour and 45-minute bus ride down from DeKalb County.

And no matter what the score suggests, Sycamore is good. It had won 7 of 10 games. It has a legitimate Division-1 commit, it has three or four 6-footers who can play, it has shooters (8 3’s tonight, matching the Potters bomb-for-bomb). Sycamore’s only problem was the Potters, who are more than good at the moment and of whom one Sycamore player said, “They NEVER get tired. Constant pressure on defense, constant moving the ball, they NEVER stand still.” In fewer words, the Sycamore coach said, “Just relentless.”

For this they rode a bus 130 miles?

And then, worn out, they have to get back on the thing and go home?

“Be sleeping,” one said, eyes on the way to sleep even as she spoke.

Thing is, they asked for it. It began last summer when the Sycamore coach, Andy Wickness, had a bright idea. Morton had made itself into one of the premier programs in all of Illinois basketball. Besides, there was the fact of Becker’s 1987 graduation from Sycamore.

“Because of what Bob has done at Morton, I picked his brain by email,” Wickness said. “He was very helpful in describing his program’s culture, the fan base, his experiences. I was very grateful for his sharing his thoughts on all that. It’s just that our conference is not very good. We’re winning by 30 and 40 points. To get to the state tournament level, the way Morton has, we need games like this.”

It’s one thing to play Morton when the Potters are playing well. It’s another to play them when they’re playing exceptionally well. On those exceptionally-well nights, the Potters kick butts, take names, and put you back on the bus home, exhausted.

Sycamore was only a point down, at 14-13, with a minute and 36 seconds to play in the first quarter. Those 96 seconds later, Morton’s leade was 24-13.

“The game turned there at the end of the first quarter,” Sycamore’s Wickness said. “Our defense let down.”

Well, a defensive letdown is in the eye of the beholder. It seemed to me, for instance, that Sycamore’s defense was just fine. Morton’s offense was simply better. After Peyton Dearing made two free throws at 1:36, Olivia Remmert’s steal gave the ball right back to Dearing for a 3-pointer. A minute later, Lindsey Dullard stole a lazy pass in the open court for a layup. And 20 seconds later, one of Raquel Frakes’s flying rebounds led to the first of Maddy Becker’s five 3-pointers tonight.

That 10-0 run in 96 seconds was followed by 8 more points, two on Katie Krupa free throws, six on two more 3’s by Becker. In a total of 3 minutes and 23 seconds, then, Morton had moved from 14-13 to 32-13 and on to leads as big as 27 points.

Thus did Becker welcome his alma mater to the big time.

“We’re playing at a really high level,” Becker said. “The way we’re playing will win a lot of games.”

What’s most obvious about Morton’s play lately is its – let’s borrow that word from Sycamore sophomore Ella Shipley – constant reach for dominance at both ends. The Potters are on attack constantly. Either they want the ball back or they want to take the ball to the rim.

“We want to attack,” Dullard said, “and we want to get into the paint. If we don’t score in there, we kick it out and” — here the senior smiled — “we ALL can shoot.” Early in the season, she said, there was a turnover problem, maybe 16 a game. No longer. “We’re going to the ball,” Dullard said, a fundamental move that diminishes the prospects of passes gone awry.

Maddy Becker, with her five 3’s, led Morton’s scoring with 21 points. (Another indication of the Potters’ strength: she is the sixth different player to lead the team in scoring this season.) Dullard had 12 poinits, Dearing 11, Krupa 10. Courtney Jones had 7, Frakes 6, Sedona McCartney 4, Makenna Baughman 3, Cailyn Cowley 2.

Morton’s Lady Potters 67, Washington 33

Like, seriously? A running clock against a team that had been undefeated? Doing it on that team’s homecourt? Early, the Potters went on a 20-0 run. Late, a 17-0 run. Such runs happen because the defense is so good it creates offense. “A champion’s DNA,” is how their coach, Bob Becker, puts it. The defending state champion Potters were 22 for 23 on free throws. Every loose ball, they were on it the second it became a loose ball. I mean, seriously? Wow. They’re 10-0 for the season. And dare I say out loud what I’m thinking?

Yes. I dare.

They could go undefeated.

The last five seasons, they’ve been 33-3, 33-3, 34-2, 31-2, and 33-3.

Counting last season’s run to the state title, they’re now on a 20-game winning streak. Tonight’s victory was their 50th straight in the Mid-Illini Conference.

They’re doing this kind of thing on a regular basis.

So why not 36-0?

Washington came in with an 8-0 record looking to re-establish itself as a legitimate rival to Morton’s years of primacy. Washington has beaten decent teams, mostly because it has good shooters and competitive defenders. This is to say, Morton’s dominance tonight was not a case of catching lightning in a bottle, nor was it an aberration or an exception. It was everything the Potters are capable of.

They led by a point at 17-16 in the first minute of the second quarter. Then that champion’s DNA showed itself. Unable to get inside on the Potters’ defense, Washington stopped making the 3’s that had kept the game close. On a 12-0 run in the last seven minutes of the quarter, Morton led, 29-16.

And if you’ve seen the Potters play, you know how they play the early minutes of the third quarter.

Like this: they scored 8 points in a minute and a half, completing that 20-0 run, and they were up 37-16.

How they got those 8 points is telling because it shows that the comfortable halftime lead wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy the Potters.

It began with Morton’s little guard, Peyton Dearing. She’d jammed a finger on her right hand and came out for the second half with the finger taped against its neighbor. She’s a left-hander, so she could put up with the tape – except when the half started, who needs tape? Seriously, who needs stinkin’ tape when what you’re doing is batting the ball away from a Washington player, diving on it, wrestling it away from the unfriendly, passing it to a friendly, hauling yourself up off the floor, sprinting to your 3-point spot, getting the ball back, and throwing in a 3-pointer – all this in the first 25 seconds of the half before taking a Lindsey Dullard pass 30 seconds later for a layup and free throw.

In less than a minute, then, Dearing’s 6 points put Morton up, 35-16, and Dullard finished the run 32 seconds later with two free throws when fouled on a put-back.

Though Washington made a small move to close within 14 points at 41-27, no one believed it could sustain the move. Morton is not only talented, it is indefatigable. Becker’s white board carried a pre-game message that included this reminder, “COMPETE 32,” with the 32 in a bold circle, meaning bring it, guys, for the full 32 minutes. It’s hardly a necessary note, for Becker’s teams have gone full-bore at both ends every minute for years, but if you’re going to go undefeated it doesn’t hurt to be reminded how you got good enough that people would dare suggest 36-0.

As evidence that Morton simply wears out its opponents, consider the Potters’ work in the last 96 seconds of the third quarter.

At 1:36, Dullard threw a 30-foot pass to Raquel Frakes for a layup.

At 1:17, Dullard threw a 30-foot pass to Makenna Baughman for a layup.

At :24, Dullard threw a 30-foot pass to Frakes for another layup.

At the buzzer, Dullard threw a 30-foot pass to Olivia Remmert for a layup.

All these passes were made possible by Dullard’s great court vision, her strength and accuracy passing, and the truth that Washington’s defenders were all tuckered out and ready for bedtime. They no longer could get back on defense.

Soon enough, it was 61-31, merciful running-clock time.

“THAT was fun,” Bob Becker said, and he said. “We had it dialed-in at both ends,” and he said, “That was terrific,” and he said, “Tonight was supposed to be WASHINGTON’S night, homecourt, undefeated, and it became our night,” and he said, “Our depth was great tonight, through eight kids, and that’s what the Sisterhood is about, everybody contributing, and we need all 16 of them,” and he said, “It’s so fun to be part of it.”

Becker’s first eight players all scored. Frakes led with 12, Dearing had 11, Maddy Becker 10, Dullard 10, Courtney Jones 8, Katie Krupa 8, Baughman 6, and Remmert 2.

 

Morton’s Lady Potters 62, St. Joseph-Ogden 27

During pre-game warm-ups, I like to watch the other team. You can see which players can shoot. The ball comes off their hands easily. You can see the athletes, those girls who move with a kind of easy swagger that says, “Yeah, I can do this.” So I watched the St. Joseph-Ogden people warm up. There was one girl. She had an athlete’s body, an athlete’s moves. She put up 3’s with a flick of the wrist.

But.

While her teammates loosened up without being seen, the girl did fancy stuff with the ball, quick-step fakes this way and that. She seemed to be working on crossover dribbles.

Isn’t that interesting, crossing over against … air?

I had two thoughts.

**She thinks she’s pretty good.

**She’s about to find out how good Morton’s defenders are.

Cutting to the chase: Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered by the Potters’ trapping man-to-man defenses, the girl spent most of the first half on the bench and did not score all night.

One small scene told a big story. She put up four 3-point shots in the third quarter. When the fourth bounced off the rim, she stood at the top of the arc and slapped her hands in frustration – and must have felt a tremendous rush of air as Morton’s Maddy Becker went sprinting past to take a long pass for an uncontested layup.

I hope I’m not being unkind to a teenage athlete. It’s just that those two shots comprised a basketball morality play. The St. Joseph-Ogden player did the wrong little thing of sulking while the Morton player did the right little thing of hustling to make the next play.

It was the kind of moment that moved the St. Joseph-Ogden coach, Kevin Taylor, to say, “Morton is what we want to be.” The Potters have won four of the last five Class 3A state championships. St. Joe finished third in last year’s Class 2A tournament. “Morton’s a good team with a lot of talent. Even with Division-1 talent, they’re unselfish with the ball. And they’re well-coached. It’s not fun getting beat this bad, but we scheduled them, last year and this year, because you have to play teams like that if you want to get to their level.”

Morton scored the game’s first 14 points in four minutes. At the quarter, it was 22-9. A 16-2 run in the second quarter made it 40-15 at halftime. In that third quarter, Morton outscored the hosts 20-2 for a 60-17 lead that made the fourth quarter a running-clock yawner.

But that third quarter, my my my.

Katie Krupa opened with a 3-pointer from the right arc. Katie Krupa? Yes. She is now 1-for-1 on 3’s this season.

Courtney Jones followed with a 3 and a layup off a nifty inside pass by Krupa.

Then a Peyton Dearing 3 and that Maddy Becker layup and a Jones steal/breakaway layup and Raquel Frakes scored the last five points on slashing layups and a free throw.

Morton is now 9-0 for the season. (If we count last season’s last 10 games, they’re on a 19-game winning streak.) St. Joe is now 8-3, most of it done against Class 2A teams.

Jones led Morton’s scoring with 16. Lindsey Dullard had 13, Frakes 11, Dearing 9, Becker 5, Krupa 4, Makenna Baughman 2 and Sedona McCartney 2.

***

My Friday report featured commentary about “hair bands.” I come now to confess and clarify.

When I began to write last night, I didn’t know what to call that little elastic thing that basketball-playing girls use to bunch their hair into ponytails. I invented a term, “hair band.”

Well. Recognizing my flawed state of being – old and male – three women today tried to educate me.

One kept it simple: “Ponytail holders.” Another said, “Scrunchies,” to which I said, “????” A third declared, “They’re hair ties.”

Next time, I’ll just call them “hair thingies.”

Morton’s Lady Potters 62, Pekin 20

Yes, you bet, most of what happened was really good stuff.

There was also this. Raquel Frakes’s hair band broke. Her ponytail fell apart. As the second quarter was about to begin, Frakes was on the bench signaling to assistant coach Brooke Bisping that, Hey, my hair band broke and I need a new one. So Bisping went, Don’t look at me, I don’t have a hair band. And then Bisping became as resourceful a coach as she was a Lady Potter in her all-time-leading-scorer-they-retired-my-jersey day.

Bisping reached into assistant coach Megan Hasler’s hair and poked around long enough to steal her colleague’s hair band. She tossed it toward Frakes, who retrieved it and replaced her ponytail with what I am told is a “messy bun.” (The things an old sportswriter learns.)

Here the drama moved into a second act, for Hasler’s hair was now a mess of its own – until she walked a few rows up into the bleachers where a spectator happened to have a spare hair band. (I once saw Dean Smith reach under the North Carolina bench to replace a player’s shoe that had ripped. But this was my first hair-band emergency.)

Perhaps all this was coincidence. Perhaps the hair repairs had nothing at all to do with it. But a guy’s gotta write something. And I am here to report that once Raquel Frakes got her messy-bun together, the 5-foot-10 junior became a flying star of such brightness that her coach, Bob Becker, said, “There’s not a better sixth-man in the entire state than Raquel.”

Two minutes into that second quarter, Frakes made a 3-pointer from the deep left corner. And as nice as that was – an excitement in the middle of a 31-3 run – Frakes did better, more important work without the ball. When she didn’t have the ball, she went and got it. A remarkable jumper (a killer outside striker on the school’s volleyball team), Frakes became a rebounding machine. A scrawl in my notebook: “FRAKES! REBS!!” A look at coach Hasler’s statistics chart showed Frakes with four rebounds in the quarter, including one that moved Becker to say, “She was like my waist high off the floor.”

Most of the time, it seemed, a Frakes rebound led to a Peyton
Dearing 3-pointer. The 5-foot-5 guard – a left-hander, just as Frakes is a left-hander – made 4 3’s in that second quarter. She needed only 4 minutes and 28 seconds to do it. “The hot hand,” Becker said, “and we got her the ball. No reason not to.”

Pekin once led, 8-6. Morton led at the quarter, 17-8. At halftime, 45-13.

If that halftime score seems outrageous, it is. But readers of long memory know that a year ago, in these teams’ December game, the halftime score was 53-0 (the final 68- 18). However mediocre Pekin may be, especially with its leading scorer out with an injury, the full truth is that the Potters were simply unbeatable tonight. Their ball-handling was crisp, deft and careful, their shooting sensational (8 3’s, 10 layups/put-backs), their defense suffocating. (I don’t know how many prayerful 3’s Pekin launched. A bunch. I do know how many 3’s they made. Zero.)

This was not cruel and unusual punishment by an undefeated, defending state champion team now 8-0 overall and 2-0 in the Mid-Illini Conference (with a 49-game league winning streak.) This was a clinic staged by high-achieving athletes practicing basketball’s fundamental skills beautifully.

Courtney Jones, the senior point guard, has taken note of all that. “Our team chemistry is getting better off the court because we’re getting to know each other better,” she said, “and we’re jelling on the court, too.”

Katie Krupa and Dearing led Morton with 12 points each. No one else reached double figures. Lindsey Dullard had 8, Frakes 7, Maddy Becker 6, Olivia Remmert 4, Courtney Jones 3, Maggie Hobson 3, Cailynn Cowley 3, Makenna Baughman 2, and Sedona McCartney 2.

Morton’s Lady Potters 75, Pontiac 35

I have this friend with a wicked smart sense of humor. After years of observation, she decided to give me, as an early Christmas gift, a pair of socks emblazoned with the words, “Grumpy Old Man.” How she came to that assessment is a mystery. Across PotterWorld the consensus is that I am grumpy only when the Potters run late in delivering my Milk Duds. But then, maybe that is it. “Seven games,” she said, “and you’ve got what? One box? You ol’ grump.”

Absent the caramel chocolate darlings, I made it through this game with the help of a second friend, one not nearly so wicked but just as smart and kind enough to ship into the Potterdome a Tupperware container of buttery sugar cookies frosted with Christmas trees. Yummy.

I mean, what’s a sportswriter to do when an undefeated team,the defending state champion, now 7-0 and imagining a fifth state title in six seasons, creates a 40-point blowout and the two biggest questions of the night come in the first 16 seconds and in the last two seconds?

First question: 16 seconds in, how in the world did Pontiac get three shots from inside the paint?

Very good teams do such work. Pontiac is not a very good team. It had lost 9 of its first 11 games.

So when Morton’s coach, Bob Becker, saw the visitors get two offensive rebounds in those first 16 seconds, he rose from the bench and in the voice of a teacher who had come to the realization that his students couldn’t count as high as two decided to shout, “THAT’S TWICE!”

Meaning that on two successive shots the Lady Potters had failed in rebounding’s ultimate fundamental.

“BOX OUT!” Becker suggested/orderered/demanded.

Second question: Would Morton, with two seconds to play, score one more 3-pointer, its 10th of the night, and reward the gathered faithful with tickets for FREE CUSTARD! at Culver’s restaurant?

After the 9th 3-pointer with 4:46 to play – by sophomore Maggie Hobson from the right side – Morton managed only one more 3-point attempt, that one at 3:10 on a running clock.

After that, Gabby Heer, a freshman and a capable 3-point shooter, drove for a layup and there was heard in the crowd a man saying, “We don’t want no stinkin’ layup,” and I believe the voice was that of a grumpy old man who had no Milk Duds and had run through his buttery sugar cookies frosted with Christmas trees and now was willing to go into a 19-dregree night to fetch his FREE CUSTARD!

Then, with maybe two seconds to play, here came Heer with the ball again – only this time she was at the far end of the court, 60 feet from the hoop, and the buzzer sounded before she could launch a FREE CUSTARD! prayer from mid-court.

Anyway, after that fundamentally-flawed first 16 seconds, the Potters pretty much were sensational in every way a team can be sensational. Its offense was relentless, its defense was merciless. The Potters scored from set plays and from ball movement that found the open shooter (Maddy Becker with four 3’s). It scored in the paint (Lindsey Dullard on drives, Katie Krupa at the rim, both players adept with either hand). Bewitched and bewildered by the Morton press, Pontiac considered itself triumphant if it so much as got the ball past midcourt.

Remember Morton’s awful, terrible, horrible, no-boxing-out start? It helped Pontiac go in front, 4-2.

Eight minutes later, Morton led, 30-9.

Halftime, 46-16.

Midway the third quarter, 66-19.

And when it was over, I asked Bob Becker what the game meant.

“We can be so, so capable,” he said. I could sense a “but” coming. Sure enough “We have to understand that we can get by against some teams without doing the little things. The seniors want to win another state championship. I know I sound nit-picky, like I’m a cranky old jerk, but we can’t beat sectional-final opponents and win at Redbird without doing all the little things right. We need every single player, all 16 of them, bringing their absolute best effort to every practice and every game every single time.”

About here, I showed my Grumpy Old Man socks to the Cranky Old Jerk.

He laughed.

Krupa led Morton’s scoring with 15, Dullard had 14, Maddy Becker 12. Raquel Frakes had 9, Courtney Jones 7, Sedona McCartney 5, Cailynn Cowley 4, Maggie Hobson 3, Makenna Baughman 2, Peyton Dearing 2, Heer 2.

December 3, 2019: “Even the not-so-pretty ones count”

Morton’s Lady Potters 53. Normal Community 43

In addition to being big, strong, quick, and relentless in pursuit of good things at both ends of the court, the Morton High School Lady Potters are sneaky.

They’ll steal from you when you’re not paying attention. You think they’re just casually bringing the ball in-bounds from under their own basket. They’re not.

Next thing you know, they’ve tossed the ball in-bounds and somebody has dropped in a layup. One pass, two seconds, they’ve scored. They’re sneaky that way.

Four times tonight, they did it. Once in the second quarter, three times in the third.

It happens this way: A Potter is assigned to toss the ball in. She’ll stand a foot in-bounds until her four teammates get into their sneaky spots. Then the ball handler steps out and takes the ball from the referee.

She makes a pass. Takes two seconds, maybe three. And the Potters have scored. It happens so quickly you might miss it. It happens so easily you’d think the defense fell asleep. Somehow it all looks like a mistake when, in fact, the Potters planned it that way.

I asked the Morton coach, Bob Becker. “How many in-bounds plays do you run that you try to score on?”

“All of them,” he said. (Well, duh. The questions some sportswriters ask.)

Three examples of Morton’s in-bounds sneakiness came in the third quarter and they came at a good time. Suddenly, the Potters were in a little trouble. They’d sprinted to a 17-4 lead at the quarter. After that, refusing to fold on the home court of the undefeated defending state champions, Normal Community’s hustling, scrapping Lady Iron made it a game and trailed only 31-23.

Then Lindsey Dullard dropped in a layup off an in-bounds pass from Courtney Jones. A minute later, Dullard took a Katie Krupa pass and did it again. The third in-bounds layup, by Raquel Frakes, happened before your faithful note-taker thought to identify the passer. The sneak.

With those three easy ones, and with Dullard opening the quarter by peeling down the lane for a layup after a fake hand-off at the free throw line – shades of the great one, Brandi Bisping, who scored on that play maybe two dozen times in her Potters days – Morton’;s lead was 37-26.

The lead grew to 45-28 on a Courtney Jones layup, a Dullard 3-pointer, and a Jones 3 with 1:20 left in the third quarter.

At quarter’s end, it was 47-30, a comfortable margin by any measure – until Morton’s offense disappeared. In a nervous-making fourth quarter, the Potters did not score a field goal. They scored nothing for nearly five minutes. Normal Community’s 9-0 run moved the Iron with eight at 47-39. Finally, Krupa made two free throws at 3:19 and two more at 2:43. The lead was 51-39. Two free throws by Dearing moved Morton up, 53-41, with 36 seconds to play.

Later, breathing easily again, Becker said, “First and third quarters, good.” They were so good that in those 16 minutes the Potters were 36-13 winners – which means they lost the other half, 30-17.

A couple other numbers are interesting, too.

“The most important minutes of a game, I think, are the first three minutes, the first three minutes of the second half, and the last three minutes of the game,” Becker said.

Morton won the first three minutes, 8-2.

The second half’s first three minutes, Morton won 8-5.

The game’s last three minutes, Morton won, 6-4.

In Becker’s most important minutes, then, Morton had a 22-11 advantage.

“Maybe we didn’t have our best intensity all night, I don’t know,” Becker said, “but it wasn’t all our problem, either. We give Normal Community credit. They handled the ball well, they kept after us on defense. We just had a couple good runs on defense, like once we had six straight stops and scored on four of those possessions.”

The Normal Community coach, Marcus Mann, said, “Morton’s a great team, they’re big, they’re strong, they’re unselfish with the ball, they can light it up with 3’s. We like to play them because it always shows us where we are in competition with the best teams. After that first quarter, we came back and stuck with them. I’m proud of how we stayed in there tonight and fought to get back in it.”

Dullard led Morton’s scoring with 18, Jones had 13, and Krupa 12. Frakes and Dearing had 4 each, Makenna Baughman 2.

Now 5-0, Morton next plays at Canton on Friday night. Alas, I won’t be there. I’ll be in Washington, D.C., with a panel of sportswriters who couldn’t make things worse up there.

Morton’s Lady Potters 60, Richwoods 53

This is how fast Peyton Dearing runs.

Z
O
O
M
!!!!

First she’s standing in the backcourt, waiting to take an in-bounds pass. Then she’s . . .

G
O
N
E

The issue was in doubt with just under three minutes to play. There was a Morton timeout, the Potters leading 56-50, but uncomfortably leading. Once up by 13, the Potters now feel the heat of a Richwoods rally. So they have the ball in the backcourt, on the far side, away from their bench – and it comes in to Peyton Dearing, a little guard, 5-foot-5, who in the sunny months is a big-time soccer star but now, in the winter, takes the in-bounds pass at a spot maybe 60 feet from the basket.

And here’s what Peyton Dearing sees.

“I was open,” she said. Well, of course, she was open. Who guards a little guard taking a pass in-bounds at the other end of the court?

And here’s what Peyton Dearing knows.

“I’m fast,” she says.

So here’s what she does. She does that soccer thing.
“I’m fast and I’m open and I’m going to the goal.”

Z
O
O
M

Only she has the ball on her left hand instead of her feet, and while the Richwoods people are in the gym, it’s as if they’re not in the same universe with Peyton Dearing, who is fast and open and sees the goal and is flying hell-bent for leather across the midcourt line, past the three-point arc at the left edge of the free throw circle where she tilts right and bends down the lane and toward the hoop, leaving a gobsmacked gaggle of Richwoods players asking . . .

W
H
A
T???

In let’s say six seconds, from catching the pass to curling the ball off the board and into the hoop, Peyton Dearing has won the basketball game.

Yes, she did. It made the lead only eight points, with 2:40 to play, and Richwoods surely had time to come back. But not this time, not when they thought they had Morton stopped only to see the Potters transform an ordinary in-bounds pass into the kind of extraordinary play in which an opponent takes your heart out and stomps that sucker flat. Richwoods scored only three points the rest of the way and two were meaningless in the game’s dying seconds.

You gotta love Morton-Richwoods basketball. The Potters have won four of the last five Class 3A state championships. Richwoods won the other one. The last three years, either could have won it all. Morton has a state-champion look about it this season as well, and while Richwoods is a lesser team without its two-time all-stater Cam Taylor (now at Marquette University), its returning stars, Jaida McCloud and Nia Williams, know how to win big games.

Richwoods led this one early, thanks to its typically aggressive, scrambling zone defense and its quickness on the boards. But once Morton switched from a man-to-man defense to a variety of zones that shut down the Richwoods offense, it was inevitable that the Potters’ offense would control the game. The big names in that offense were Lindsey Dullard and Katie Krupa. Dullard’s 22 points came from inside and out, on slashing drives to the hoop, and on 3-pointers where she twice rose above Richwoods’ zone to hurl her daggers. Krupa’s 19 came on delicate, bruising work inside where she powered through Richwoods’ clawing defenders to finesse shots off the glass with either hand.

Four Krupa free throws and a Maddy Becker 3-pointer gave Morton a 7-0 run in less than two minutes of the second quarter. It gave Morton a 21-15 lead and the Potters never trailed again. They led at halftime, 32-24, and 51-40 after three.

Getting late in the fourth quarter, that 11-point lead fell to six when Nia Williams threw in a 3-pointer with 2:52 to play.

Morton called timeout at 2:50.

Did the Potters’ coach, Bob Becker, draw up a play for Peyton Dearing?

“No,” she said, smiling at the things that happen sometimes.

Maybe next time he will draw it up. Or maybe he’ll do what all good coaches do. Let the players play. For that was a player’s play. Catch it, keep your head up, see what’s in front of you – and if no one’s in front of you, do the Peyton Dearing thing. Just stand on the gas. If no one gets in the way, keep going.

“I mean, like, I was open,” she said again.

Z
O
O
M

Yes, there is that. And it was good. It was even sensational. But the other stuff was just as important, the other stuff being taking three charges (none called), taking an elbow in the jaw that knocked her flat (offensive foul), and eagerly participating on hands, knees, and ponytail in more than one mad scramble for a loose ball, not to mention a steal and nifty pass to Krupa for the third-quarter’s last two points.

I bring all that up because it was obvious that Dullard and Krupa would be all-tournament choices. Not so obvious was Morton’s third player on the all-tournament team. Peyton Dearing scored six points.

Along with Dullard’s 22, Krupa’s 19, Dearing’s 6, Becker had 9 and Courtney Jones 4.

***

Lady Potters 61, Champaign Central 54

In the morning game, the Potters might have won by 100. Instead, Becker put his starters on the bench halfway through the third quarter. Morton led then, 54-26.

1. Dullard led Morton with 23 points, Krupa had 11. Raquel Frakes had 7, Jones 6, Dearing 5, Becker 3, and three players had 2 apiece: Cailyn Cowley, Maggie Hobson, and Abbie Steider.

Morton’s Lady Potters 55, East St. Louis 51

So, a half-hour before tip-off, I’m watching the East St. Louis High School Flyerettes warm up before the final game of Morton’s Thanksgiving Tournament’s first day in the Potterdome.

Wait. Flyerettes?

Hmm. Might Morton High School drop the Lady from its girls teams nickname? So dainty, so genteel, those Lady Potters, a nickname suggestive of perfumes and flowers, not so much suggestive of a dynasty that has won four state championships the last five years. Might the powers that be rename them the more muscular POTTERETTES?

No, not likely, and anyway ’tis a question for another day because the question during the East St. Louis warmups was, like, OMG, really?

All that skipping and hopping? Then all the stretching and twisting? And after all that came the that-has-to-hurt-bad part. They all threw themselves onto the floor and arranged their limbs in splayed-out positions suggesting a chiropractor would be hard-pressed to un-pretzel everybody.

I thought, “Yeah, I could get into that position and I would never walk again.”

The news is, East St. Louis survived its calisthentics. The Flyerettes not only walked again, they all but flew. Quick afoot, good with the ball in hand, relentless on the boards and defensively, the Flyerettes led Morton for the game’s first 10 minutes and came from 11 points down late in the fourth quarter to throw one last fright into the defending state champions.

It was Morton, 53-42, when Makenna Baughman scored on a full-speed-ahead fast break layup that was the result of a Raquel Frakes steal and outlet to Peyton Dearing who moved the ball to Baughman two steps from the hoop. The clock showed 3:19 to play. All seemed safe and secure for the Potters – until the Flyerettes scored six straight points – on a put-back and two fast-break layups in a 72-second burst — and trailed by only five with 1:21left.

Time for a Potter to be a hero.

Lindsey Dullard time.

Already 6-for-6 on free throws in the second half, she made it 8 in a row with two more at 1:13. Morton’s lead was 55-48, good enough to hang on.

Dullard was the difference all night. The all-stater was at her best when it meant the most. She scored 11 of Morton’s 28 second-half points. She was also a constant force rebounding, on defense, and in handling the ball late in the game against the aggressive, pestiferous East St. Louis defenders.

Of East St. Louis, Morton’s coach, Bob Becker, said, “They’re very athletic and fairly disciplined. They put us in situations that we’ll learn from. We got a victory, but we learned we have to do a better job fighting on the boards. We have to understand that things we can get away with practice, we can’t get away with in games against teams like East St. Louis.”

The sophomore Katie Krupa saw the game “as so much fun, just like last year’s games,” and Dullard said, “I knew that we all had to be confident in everything we did and play the way that we all know how to play. We had to be the more aggressive team. This game told us that we can battle and compete with the more athletic teams.”

Dullard’s 19 points led Morton. Krupa had 16, Baughman 8, Courtney Jones 5, Dearing 4, and Frakes 3.

A note of interest to history majors in the audience: This was a long-delayed meeting of history-making teams. In 1980 East St. Louis’s Lincoln High School won the Class AA girls state championship. For 35 years it remained the only downstate public school outside of Peoria (Richwoods, Manual) to win the AA title. Then, in 2015, Morton’s Lady Potters became ONLY SMALL-TOWN public school state champion in that class, by then rejiggered to be Class 3A.

***

Potterettes 60, Batavia 30.

As much of a nail-biter as its evening game was, Morton’s morning game was a relaxing hour and 15 minutes in an easy chair.

Nine minutes in, Morton led 24-4.

Dullard led the scoring with 15, Dearing had 12 (on four 3-pointers). Krupa had 9, Jones 7. Maddy Becker, Maggie Hobson, Paige Griffin, Frakes, and Baughman all had 3 apiece.Cailyn Cowley had 2.

The Potters wind up the tournament Saturday with an 11:45 a.m. game against Champaign Central and a 5 o’clock game,likely for the tournament championship, against Peoria Richwoods, twice an easy winner on Friday.