Sunday, about noon, Courtney Jones texted Bob Becker. She wanted to go to the Morton High School gym and shoot. Most Sunday noons, most girls basketball coaches snooze through Sunday afternoon football. Becker was at the gym, doing whatever a coach does when his two decades of teams have racked up a zillion W’s and three state championships. He sent a text back to Jones, a junior, saying, “I’m here, come on over. Do me a favor, Court. Bring me a Number 12 from Jimmy John’s.”

Jones had already commandeered her father as rebounder for the shooting session. Then she said, “And bring your credit card, Dad. Coach wants a Number 12.”

Don’t you love it when things work out? The junior, a two-year starter, comes to the Potterdome for an hour of shooting on Sunday. Two days later, she is a shooting star in the Lady Potters’ 57-52 season-opening victory at Normal Community. And not just an ordinary victory – on the road against a team that is state-ranked in Class 4A (with three D-1 commits) and was undefeated in four games.

“That’s a good one,” Becker said. “I’m proud of these kids.”

Maybe the Potters win it without Jones throwing in four 3-pointers, one in each quarter. Maybe they come from 12 points down late in the third without her. Maybe they create momentum with something other than her back-to-back 3’s that told Normal Community trouble was on the way.

Or maybe not. Anything less than what Jones did when she did it, Normal Community might have extended that 12-point lead to 20, Game Over.

The Potters were down, 42-30, with a minute and a half left in the third quarter. The junior forward, Lindsay Dullard, made a 3 at 1:21, and then Jones squared up at the top of the key for a 3 with 27 seconds left. Suddenly, it was 42-36, and in the first minute of the fourth quarter Jones made another 3 from out front. Now, at 42-39, it was Game On.

Jones made two free throws at 3:27 of the fourth to give Morton a 47-46 lead, its first since the score was 8-6. From there, the Potters’ senior star, Tenley Dowell, took over. She scored on three straight trips, first from 15 feet, then on a slashing drive for a layup, last with a steal near mid-court that she converted into a breakaway layup and a 53-51 lead with 55 seconds to play. She had not scored since 1:54 of the second quarter.

Twice in the game’s last 30 seconds, Normal Community was forced to foul Dullard. She all but raced to the free throw line, eager to get the ball in her hands. “Oh, I was confident,” she said. “I wanted to make them and win the game.” Which she did, four in a row, two at :27.9, two more at :18.2.

All W’s are beautiful, true. It’s also true that some of the beauties come with more sweat than others. Becker used 11 of his 14 players in the first half, looking for someone to make something happen and finding no one. That half was an especially sweaty 16 minutes of basketball. That said, it’s only fair to note that three of the Lady Potters’ starters – Dullard, Jones, and Katie Krupa – moved from volleyball to basketball only 10 days ago.

Speaking of Krupa, let’s speak of Krupa. The 6-foot freshman can flat play. She’s strong, quick, and agile. She can score inside with either hand, she has a nice touch from outside, she’s aggressive defensively and on the boards. At the back of the :Potters’ press against Normal Community, she anticipated a long pass, tipped it away, and gained control long enough for Becker to call a timeout. One second later, fouled on the in-bounds pass, Dullard made the game’s last two points.

“I was really nervous about my first official high school game,” Krupa said. “But as soon as I hit the court, it was all gone.”

She was one of four Potters scoring in double figures. Dowell led with 16, Dullard and Jones had 14 each, and Krupa 11. The Potters made six 3’s to Normal Community’s 3. The losers’ star, Maya Wong, scored 14 points – but had none in the game’s last 12 minutes while defended by Dowell and Jones mostly. In those same 12 minutes, by the way, Dullard and Dowell combined for 17 points.

One more thing. That Number 12 at Jimmy John’s? It’s turkey breast with provolone and avocado, dressed with cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, and mayo.

An hour before, Kassidy Shurman twirled the edges of her Rubik’s Cube. The mystifying puzzle had become a thing for her basketball team. “Maybe eight of us do it,” she said. She sat on the Morton High School Lady Potters bench, waiting to suit up in the locker room. It would be the season’s 33rd game, the 141st for Shurman’s senior class, three times running the state champions, looking for a fourth straight.

“How long does it take you to solve it?” I asked, knowing the answer would shame me, for my encounters with Erno Rubik’s invention mostly ended with the thing flying across the room, followed by words such as #$%@&#!

“I can do it under two minutes,” Shurman said. Then, smiling, “My goal is under one minute.”

Two weeks ago, Shurman said she’d never had so much fun on a basketball team. They were Rubik’s Cube nerds, twirling the thing on the bench even in the hour before Thursday night’s sectional championship game. Have you heard of Nerf Guns? Me, neither. But the Potters also turned those toys into team-bonding devices. Best of all, they had won 31 games this season, most of them laughers built on sustained excellence, and if a guy were to write a book about these girls, he had a title: “Laughing All the Way.”

From the seventh grade on – they won a state championship there, too – Shurman moved with teammates Josi Becker and Caylie Jones to achievements unheard of in Illinois girls basketball. In six years of competition, those three played on teams that had won 183 games and lost 10. How good is that? The answer is in another question. If life throws you 193 puzzles, how many of us are good enough to solve 183 of them?

Four minutes into the game, Shurman, a 5-foot-3 shooter, made a 3-pointer from the top of the key to give Morton a 3-2 lead over Peoria Richwoods. There came a great roar from the standing-room-only crowd at Dunlap High, maybe 2,500 people there to see Morton, ranked No. 1 in the state, against Richwoods, No. 2, both teams with 31-1 records, both convinced that the winner would go on to become state champions. Shurman’s shot set off a chant in the Morton student section, “I believe that we will win, I believe that we will win.”

Too early, kids, too early.

Forty-five seconds later, Richwoods scored on an offensive rebound. That bucket was a signal of the storm to come. Of Richwoods’ 19 field goals this night, 16 came at the rim or a step away. The Peorians were the bigger, stronger, faster, and more aggressive team. Defensively, their 2-3 zone’s outside people pushed Morton’s offense so far behind the 3-point arc that the Potters seldom earned even a decent look. Inside, Richwoods’ 6-foot-1 Camryn Taylor emphatically swatted away at least three layups and all night dared anyone to drive into the paint.

Using the same zone defense, Richwoods had beaten Morton in the season’s fourth game, 53-45. This time, instead of finding a solution to that puzzle, the Potters were confused. At the end of the first quarter, his team down 11-3 and having put up only four shots, the Potters’ coach, Bob Becker, looked at his players on the bench and shouted, “WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?”

Momentarily, the Potters rallied. They gained a tie at 13 with 2:57 left in the half.

But that was it. In the 11 minutes of play, Richwoods scored the game’s next 22 points. In short, Richwoods did to Morton what Morton had done to so many teams this season. It went on an extended run of dominance at both ends. Richwoods led at halftime, 20-13, and crushed the Potters in the third quarter.

As helpless as Morton’s offense had been in the first quarter – Shurman’s 3 was the only field goal – the Potters disappeared in the third. For the first time all season, they came undone on offense. A scribble in my notebook: “Can’t make silly turnovers against R’woods.” They did not score in the quarter. If that has happened in my eight years watching Becker’s teams, I don’t remember it. At the end of three, Richwoods led, 33-13. Game over.

For Richwoods’ coach, Todd Hursey, the victory was sweet for many reasons. “This team is on a mission to win the program’s 1,000th game,” he said. “We’re two away now.” He was thrilled, too, that the victory came against Morton. “Bob’s teams have set the bar, not only in the last three years winning the state, but for a decade.” Hursey, who has four starters returning next season, also said, “Now maybe it’s our turn.”

Bob Becker said the only thing he could say: “They took us out of everything we tried to do. . . . They guarded the heck out of us. . . . They got us rattled a little bit. … We got beat by a better team. … We ran into a buzzsaw.”

In the game’s last minute, Becker sent in substitutes for his three seniors, Jones, Shurman, and his daughter, Josi. As each came to the bench, they stopped for a long, quiet hug with the coach. Later, coming from the locker room, tears in her eyes, Josi Becker said, “We just didn’t execute our offense.” I asked how it felt, the four years over. “It sucks,” she said.

I asked Kassidy Shurman what happened in the game. ”I have no idea,” she said. “They were just the better team tonight. They played phenomenal.” Now, the end, four years done? “It sucks,” she said, and she wept, and she said, “I’ve never felt like this. This isn’t anything I’ve ever felt. This sucks.”

Surprising myself, for I have been at this sportswriting thing a long time without ever doing such a thing, I hugged the little watch-charm guard that I’ve seen running hellbent-for-leather since she teamed up with Jones and Becker to win in the seventh grade. And I told Kassidy what a lot of us would say to every one of the Potters, “Thanks for giving all of us more than we ever gave you.”

The Morton Lady Potters improved their season record to 30-1 and secured their 4th Regional Championship in as many years on Thursday, February 15th.  Morton used swarming team defense and efficient offense to jump out to a 46-2 lead on the Regional host, Herscher High School Tigers (25-6) and cruised to a 84-32 victory in the Regional Championship game.

The victory came 2 nights after dismantling the Pontiac Indians (12-13), in the same gym, by a score of 71-18.  So yes, you could say that Morton passed the Regional test this year with flying colors. It did take 808 miles of driving to complete the task, but the rides home were memorable and it is now part of this journey that the girls will never forget.

Now the Lady Potters move on to the next step in their quest for an unprecedented 4th consecutive State Championship, which is Sectional play.  Morton was assigned to the Dunlap Sectional and will play the winner of Canton and Quincy Notre Dame on Tuesday, February, 20th at 6pm.

Donald Pyles Photography – PDR_1111

Two minutes and 25 seconds into tonight’s game, Bob Becker, the Morton High School Lady Potters coach, crouched in front of his starting five. There he said, “Your season’s on the line with every loose ball.”

He didn’t mean it exactly. He didn’t mean it for this night. He meant that now, in late February, to beat a really good team in a really important game, they would need to chase down every loose ball they saw.

Still, remember those words.

“Your season’s on the line….”

At that moment in tonight’s regional championship game, Morton had a 9-0 lead and Herscher High School’s Lady Tigers had called a timeout. They should’ve called a taxi.

Soon enough, Morton led, 22-1.

And there came a loose ball at the Herscher end.

A loose ball!!

“ . . . with every loose ball.”

From five feet away, Caylie Jones dived at the treasure. Then came Tenley Dowell. They were wrapped around the ankles of the poor Herscher girl who had lost the handle on the ball. And here came Lindsey Dullard leaping into the scramble – all three Potters scuffling for the loose ball because, as we had heard, their season was on the line.

The melee turned into a jump ball, possession to Herscher, but the point was made. Whatever it takes, the Morton girls are giving it. Hearing Becker’s words and then seeing them put into action so vividly – even at 22-1 on the way to an 84-32 victory – I made a note:

“Have to laugh!!”

I wasn’t laughing at the downtrodden Herscher girls who, though 22-5 for the season and playing on their home court, had zero-nada-zilch chance against the Potters.

I was laughing because sometimes things are so damned good you just gotta laugh.

Look at the first quarter. That laugh-a-thon ended 28-1. The Potters’ pressing, trapping defense discombobulated Herscher in ways the Tigers had never been discombobulated: three traveling violations in its first six possessions, and two other times it threw passes that, except for bumping into walls, would have wound up in Cabery 10 miles west on Rt. 115. Offensively, the Potters were a highly polished machine running free and easy. They scored on beautiful fast breaks, in lightning-strike transition, out of patiently-worked sets, and on 4 3-pointers, each from a different point of the compass. Tenley Dowell once found herself turned sideways to the board on a drive down the right side of the key, so she put some pool-hall english on the ball to spin it in, the artist as a young woman.

Now winners of 27 straight games, the Potters take a 30-1 record to a Tuesday game in next week’s Dunlap sectional – a tournament likely to come down to a rematch of Morton’s only loss, in the season’s fourth game, to Peoria Richwoods, 53-45. That night, if it comes, will be a night when possession of loose balls matters greatly.

It says here that, just in time for Richwoods, the Potters are playing their best basketball.

In the last 10 games, they have established dominance immediately. They have left people breathless in the first quarter. Here are those first-quarter scores: 22-2, 14-4, 18-13, 13-8, 22-7, 22-4, 15-6, 25-5, 25-2, and 28-1. The average first-quarter score: 20-5.

In just the last three games, Morton has outscored its opponents in the first quarter, 78-8. It has allowed three field goals.

And how much fun is that?

“It’s been awesome,” Caylie Jones said, and Lindsey Dullard said, “We’re high-fiving out there,” and Kassidy Shurman said, “It doesn’t get any better. I’m a senior and I’ve been on great teams and had great teammates. But this year has been the best. It’s the most fun ever, hands-down.”

Dullard led Morton’s scoring tonight with 20, Josi Becker had 19, Maddy Becker and Dowell 10 apiece, Shurman 6, Courtney Jones and Peyton Dearing 5 each, Caylie Jones 4, Addi Cox and Clarie Kraft 2 each, and Bridget Wood 1. The Potters made 13 3-pointers, 4 by Josi Becker, 3 by Maddy Becker, 3 by Dullard, 2 by Shurman, and 1 by Dearing.

Oh, there’s one more indication of Morton’s merciless nature these days . . .

It came from a kindly lady in the bleachers, there to root for the Potters. At the end of the first quarter, with Morton on that 28-1 run, the lady said, “I feel sorry for Herscher.”

She was worried about the delicate sensibilities of the host Tigers.

But, hey. This is the post-season. It’s win or go home. The Potters now need to win five more games for an unprecedented fourth straight state championship.

So the lady’s neighbor in the bleachers said, “Not yet.”

Even at 28-1 she would not risk lending aid and comfort to the enemy.

“Maybe in the last minute,” she said. “But not yet.”

Atta girl.

If I knew how I got to Herscher, I’d tell you. Google Maps showed me a way. It looked to be a hundred miles. Get off I-55 at Odell, go east to Campus, north to Herscher. Yeah, right. You ever been east of Odell? It’s siloes and snowmobiles stuck in the ditch. Ever seen the Village of Campus, population 100? Me, neither. Somehow we wound up on the World’s Oldest Semi-Paved Highway. At last we ker-bumpity’d into Herscher, a nice, little town where the Morton Lady Potters began attacking another state championship.

I say “attacking” in a bow to a Potters’ all-time great, the little guard Chandler Ryan, who insisted that “defending” a championship was a passive statement. “We’re attacking the championship,” she said. That they did, winning not only a second in Ryan’s time but adding a third straight last season. Now they’re on the attack again.

How the Potters were assigned to the Herscher regional, I have no idea. Herscher is not in Morton’s region unless your idea of region includes anyplace where corn and beans can be grown. But I’m not here to complain about geographic puzzlements. (Truth is, we arrived so early we had time to discover the Herscher Family Restaurant and enjoy a fine meal.) I am here to report on the Potters’ attack.

Morton 71, Pontiac 18.

It was 25-2 after a quarter.

Thursday night the Potters will play for the regional championship and the right to advance to sectional play in Dunlap.

Morton is now 29-1 for the season. It’s on a 26-game winning streak. In the last three seasons and tonight’s regional game, the Potters have won 22 straight win-or-go-home games in state tournament play. It needs to win six more in the next three weeks to win the Class 3A championship a fourth time. No girls team has ever done that.

So why not the Potters and why not now?

They’re skilled basketball players playing free and easy. They’re scoring on fast breaks. They’re scoring out of sets. They’re throwing in 3’s. They’re turning steals and turnovers into transition runaways. Out a merciless trapping press and in man-to-man, they’re playing defense as if giving up one field goal is an affront to their sensibilities. They’ve now built a reputation that precedes them – as we’ll see in tonight’s quotes from the Pontiac coach – and every night they polish that reputation to a shining, shimmering glow.

After the game, Pontiac’s Dan Gschwendtner used CoachSpeak to praise the Potters and their coach, Bob Becker.

“They just all get after it,” he said, emphasis on the “after it.”

Teams getting after it are teams that attack.

“They do the hardest thing that any coach has to do. Everybody buys in.”

Players buying-in are players who create teams with one mind, everyone on fire with a shared ambition.

“Everyone makes the extra pass,” the Pontiac coach said. “Everyone goes after the loose ball.” Then he said, “I don’t know how Bob does it, but every one of them buys in.”

So I asked Becker, “How do you do it?”

The coach, now in his 19th season, gave an answer 19 years in the making.

“All the great teams and players of the past have built a program that now we call ‘The Potter Way,’” he said. “They play hard and they play unselfishly and they play with the goal of ‘consistent excellence.’ It’s never about individuals. It’s always about team. Every huddle, every meeting, we end with ‘TEAM.’”

That TEAM is on a roll. Tonight, in 2 ½ minutes, it made its first three shots, all 3-pointers, two by Josi Becker, one by Lindsey Dullard, for a 9-0 lead. After Pontiac somehow scored, the Potters went on a 16-0 run to end the quarter.

My favorite moments in that run came late, both on defense. Stretching high out of a trap, Tenley Dowell simply took the ball out of a bewildered Pontiac player’s hands and went the other way for a layup and free throw. In the last minute, Kassidy Shurman bumped up against a dribbler long enough to pick her pocket and toss the ball to Dowell at the other end. Another layup.

The TEAM played so well that Bob Becker said, “Our kids are so confident now, I don’t think there’ll be a moment too big for us.”

Josi Becker made 4 3’s tonight and led Morton’s scoring with 16. Dullard and Dowell each had 13. Maddy Becker scored 7. Courtney Jones, Peyton Dearing, and Caylie Jones had 4 apiece. Kathryn Reiman and Claire Kraft had 3 each, and Addi Cox and Bridget Wood 2 each.

As best this intrepid reporter could find, the Potters had only one problem tonight. Assistant coach Megan Hasler made it her duty to find a solution. A half hour after the game, she had an iPhone in hand. When returning from distant lands, the Potters have a tradition of stopping the team bus at the first McDonald’s along the way. McDonald’s has franchises in Moscow, Beijing, and the seventh ring of Saturn. But Herscher, Illinois? Get real.

“The nearest Mac’s,” Hasler reported, “is in Kankakee.”

“But,” I said, “that’s in the wrong direction, isn’t it?”

“I have no idea,” Hasler said.

I dunno if the Potters ever found their quarter-pounders. But on my long ride home, I passed a McDonald’s in Pontiac right before I made a wrong turn into a street marked with a sign saying DEAD END. Sigh.

If Josi Morgan played for the Morton High School Lady Potters, you’d love her. I love her, anyway. She’s a tiny guard at Washington High who played her last home game tonight on the Panthers’ Senior Night. She didn’t get much done – 7 points – but at 5-foot-2 she’s an athlete quick and strong, she’s a firecracker competitor, she handles the ball every minute, and she scores from everywhere. A foot taller, maybe not even that much, she’d be Tenley Dowell.

So after the Potters beat Washington tonight, 67-44, I asked her, “How good is Morton now?”

“Really good,” Morgan said. “It felt like they made every shot they took. They made, like, EVERYTHING.”

“How tough,” I asked, “was the Morton press?”

“They had us kinda shaking in that first quarter,” she said of a quarter in which Morton’s pressing, trapping defense ignited a transition offense that distinguished itself with scoring of all kinds: fast break layups, mid-range jumpers, and 3-pointers. At the quarter, Morton led, 25-5.

“One time,” I said to Morgan, “they had both 6-footers, Dowell and Lindsey Dullard, trapping you.”

Standing at midcourt, there for the last time in a memorable career, Josi Morgan laughed out loud at the image of Dowell and Dullard towering over her, skyscrapers blotting out the little girl’s sun.

“They’re so long,” she said.

She laughed again. “It’s nuts!”

Thank you, Josi Morgan, for she has given us a new superlative. All season we have know the Lady Potters to be great, wonderful, awesome, and pretty dang good. Now, in trying to define the indefinable, Josi Morgan teaches us to say, “It’s nuts!”

It’s nuts to think the Lady Potters are this good. They’ve won 25 straight games. They’re 28-1 for the season. They recently beat somebody, 84-11.They beat somebody else, 77-33. They’ve done it playing their starters a half. All 14 varsity players have scored in multiple games. Tonight the Potters were efficient on offense, merciless on defense, and relentlessly aggressive at both ends. For a month now, in the manner of outstanding teams playing well, they have made the game look ridiculously easy. As coach Bob Becker said tonight, “They’ve been so consistently excellent. These kids are amazing.”

It’s nuts to think the Potters could have named the score tonight — nuts, maybe, but accurate. Had Becker said so, it could have been 107-27. Morton’s trapping defense was so good that Washington no longer chose where to throw its passes, and by that I mean Morton forced passes to go where they wanted them to go. And Becker was shouting from the bench, “Get that, get THAT,” meaning go get that pass that we forced them to to throw to us.

The coach was so engaged with his team’s defense that it seemed his ambition was limitless. Afterwards, I suggested that he wanted to hold Washington scoreless.

“Why not?” he said, smiling. “You’re not going to lose many games if the other team doesn’t score.”

It’s also nuts to think the Potters are now seven victories away from becoming the first girls program ever to win four straight state championships. They begin tournament play Tuesday at Herscher in a 6 p.m. regional game against Monday’s Pontiac-Coal City winner.

(Wait. Have I mentioned the Washington pep band yet? I have hated on it for years. I have hated on it because it plays SO FREAKIN’ LOUD I CAN’T HEAR MYSELF SAY THE POPCORN IS TERRIBLE. It has played at jet-fighter volume. Tonight, to be fair, it didn’t seem so bad, though it’s possible my hearing has been so damaged in previous visits that I wouldn’t know if a shotgun went off beside my earlobe.)

Anyway, seven more victories – two in a regional at Herscher, two in a sectional at Dunlap, one in a super-sectional at Coal City, and two in the finals at Redbird Arena. “Now we go on the road,” Becker said.

So, after tonight’s exercise, I asked the Potters’ starters: “How ready is the team to win a fourth straight state championship?”

Kassidy Shurman: “We can go all the way if we continue to do the right things in practice and stay focused, one game at a time.”

Caylie Jones: “We’re really ready. We’ve been playing consistently for the whole 32 minutes every game.”

Josi Becker: “Now we’re coming to the best part of the season.”

Tenley Dowell: “Right now everyone has confidence. Every one of us can score. We’re ready.”

Lindsey Dullard: “It’s going to be a fun road trip.”

Tonight’s victory gave the Potters a second straight undefeated season in the Mid-Illii Conference (14-0, ith a 33-game winning streak in the league). After seasons of 33-3, 33-3, and 34-2, the Potters could go 35-1 this time.

Bob Becker, for one, expects it.

“I feel confident,” he said. “Somebody’s gonna have to play a great game to beat us.”

Dowell led Morton’s scoring tonight with 15. Dullard had 13, Shurman 12, Caylie Jones 10. Josie Becker had 5, Bridget Wood and Maddy Becker had 3 each, Peyton Dearing and Addi Cox had 2 each, and Olivia Remmert and Courtney Jones had 1 each.

Better than a night at the circus, this was. You can have your trapeze aerialists and lions leaping through flames. Give me Senior Night at a full-house, full-throated Potterdome. Give me the Morton High School dance team and the best Pep Band in the land. Give me the CO-ED gymnasts, or tumblers, or whatever they were, dozens of daring young men and women twisting through the air and coming to Earth in ways that surely meant business for every chiropractor in town.

Yea, verily, give me the Lady Potters 60, Canton 32. On this night when three seniors played at home for the last time, let me hear Bob Becker quote a wise old poet. “I don’t make a habit of reading Dr. Seuss,” the Potters’ coach said, “But he said, ‘Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.’”

What’s happened with this senior class – with Josi Becker, Caylie Jones, and Kassidy Shurman – is that they started winning basketball games early and never stopped. The first time I saw those three, at Parkside Elementary in Normal, they won a state championship for Morton Junior High. The next year, they lost once. Their grade school record: 52-1. In these last four years, the Potters varsity has won 127 games and lost 9. Add it up: 179 victories, 10 defeats. Becker declared them “the winningest class in Potters history.”

The best part is, they’re not done.

Not even close to done.

We’re about to start three more weeks of Seussian smiling. There’s a regional, a sectional, a super-sectional, and a weekend at Redbird Arena.

“If they go down,” Becker said, thinking of the journey ahead, “they’ll go down fighting.”

Wait.

He didn’t like what he heard himself say.

So he said, “But I don’t think they’re going to go down. They’re going to win.”

Not that long ago, such talk could have been dismissed as bravado. Who could imagine little Morton high school winning a state championship against the big-city schools from up north? But that was then, this is now. Now the Potters have won the thing three straight years. And now it is altogether right, fitting, and proper that Becker should declare that winning a fourth straight championship is more than just a dream, he expects it.

And why not? The Potters are on a 24-game winning streak. They’re 27-1 for the season. At 13-0 with one conference game to play – at Washington this Friday – they have clinched the Mid-Illini championship in a season of such sustained dominance that Becker said, “They have been so consistently excellent, it’s amazing.”

Here’s a note about the Potters’ consistency. Remember their game in Canton in December? Morton won, 62-44. I spoke with the Canton coach afterward and heard her say something that anyone around the Mid-Illini for two or three minutes should have thought twice about saying. She said, “There’ll be a different outcome next time.” I suppose the argument could be made that she was right about a different outcome. Instead of losing by 18, this time she lost by 28.

For a while, Canton seemed to have a chance. Though Morton ran off the game’s first nine points in fewer than three minutes, its halftime lead was only 23-17. But in keeping with strategy, tactics and habit, the Potters torched Canton in the early minutes of the third quarter.

“Our kids just flew around on defense,” Becker said. “That got us into an up-tempo attack and got Canton back on their heels.” The scrambling, trapping defense produced a 12-0 run on the way to a 41-21 lead. Midway through the fourth quarter, another 12-0 run made it 56-29. At that point, the different outcome was so certain that Morton’s rambunctious student section serenaded the visitors from Canton: “Drive home safely . . . . Drive home safely.”

Becker had planned to take his three seniors out of the game one by one, giving each a chance to hear applause for a career well done. But the way the game broke, and perhaps more fittingly, they came out together. Becker hugged them all, his daughter Josi first, then Caylie Jones, then Kassidy Shurman. And teammates rose from the bench to join in a group hug that might have been a dozen deep.

I asked them how it felt, this last time in the Potterdlome.

“I feel like I should be a freshman,” Kassidy said.

“I’ve been to a lot of Senior Nights,” Josi said. “Now, that’s us.”

“All season I’ve been thinking of ‘last’ things,” Caylie said.

Coincidentally, each senior plans to study medicine in college, a conjunction of ambitions that caused their coach, Becker, to say, “These girls have not just played ‘with’ each other, they’ve played ‘for’ each other. It wouldn’t surprise me if someday they go into practice together, the Kassidy-Josi-Caylie Medical Clinic.”

Tenley Dowell led Morton’s scoring tonight with 20. Lindsey Dullard had 18 (with four 3-pointers). Caylie Jones and Shurman had 6 apiece. Courtney Jones and Josi Becker had 4 each. Maddy Becker had 2.

I’m puzzled. There’s a thing I want to write about. I really want to write about it. Problem is, it’s not much about basketball. And we’re here for the basketball. Again, the Morton High School Lady Potters won easy, 80-31 at Limestone tonight. Their 23rd straight victory raises the Potters’ record to 26-1. They’re 12-0 in the Mid-Illini and may have clinched the league title. That, I dunno. I also don’t care because I’m vamping here while trying to dream up a way to write about what I want to write about.

Thirty-one seconds into the game tonight, Limestone had the lead.

It was 2-0.

Twenty-four seconds later, Morton began a 20-0 run.

The Potters did it the way they usually do it. The three-times-running state champions did it with a trapping defense so good that Limestone had cause to celebrate if it completed two passes in a row. Their transition offense was sensational. If the Potters coach Bob Becker shouted “Let’s go, let’s GO” one times, he shouted it a dozen times. His team turned interceptions, steals and other daylight robberies into 3-on-1 fast-breaks. They scored from outside, with three 3-pointers by the Becker sisters, two by Josi, one by Maddy, and they scored inside with crisp passing, such as a Lindsey Dullard pass to the back-cutting Tenley Dowell.

The 20-0 run took four minutes. It was 22-4 after a quarter, 45-16 at halftime (Becker had called off the trapping defense), and 66-23 after three.

Delighted by what he’d seen, especially in that first quarter when the Potters stood on the accelerator every second, Becker said, “I liked our energy and I liked our confidence. It’s nice to play at that level.”

It was nice, too, to play so well on a night when Cindy Bumgarner was in the crowd. She’s one of the Lady Potters’ all-time greats, a 1984 graduate who went on to star at Indiana University. Her name is all over the Potters’ record book, second in scoring to Brooke Bisping, second in rebounds to Brandi Bisping, and both first and second in season scoring average: 23.3 a game in ’83, 24.4 in ’84.

After the game, Becker gathered the Potters and introduced Bumgarner as “the legend” and “maybe the best Potter ever.”

Bumgarner, smiling, said, “Maybe?”

Becker recovered quickly: “Well, I never saw Cindy play. But you have to have that kind of ‘humble swagger.’ You have to believe in yourself.”

Bumgarner told the players they “must focus on what’s ahead.” Yes, nice to have won three state championships in a row. Yes, nice to be riding high now. But looking back doesn’t help you go ahead, and looking too far ahead doesn’t get you there. “The focus now has to be one game at a time,” she said.

By now the careful readers has noticed that I still haven’t figured out a way to write what I want to write. I’ve tried to work in words that might suggest the odd thing, words such as “anatomy” and “dismemberment” and “post-mortem,” even “autopsy.” They’re all good sportswriterly words that have been used in talking about games in which one team left the other for dead.

I’ll give myself another couple minutes of thinking. Here’s the Potters’ scoring: Dowell 16, Josi Becker 13, Dullard 9, Maddy Becker 8, Peyton Dearing 8, Kassidy Shurman 6, Kathryn Reiman 6, Caylie Jones 4, Megan Gold 4, Claire Kraft 2, Addi Cox 2, Courtney Jones 2.

I also want to say something about my favorite moment of this game.

It came in the last minute. The score was 77-31. Morton had the ball. It came to Megan Gold low on the left side, near the 3-point line. Gold is an inside player, seldom allowed outside the paint. But here’s the thing. She used to be a barrel racer. If you’ve ever met a barrel racer – I knew one named Monique Gattreaux – you know barrel racers are not only strong enough to ride horses hell-bent for leather, they’re absolutely fearless.

Anyway, the ball came to Gold.

She realized where she was.

So she took a step back behind the 3-point line.

And the barrel-racing post player put up a step-back 3.

“We were up 50, so I was, like, OK . . . ” Gold said, all smiles.

Oh, if only it had gone in. But it caught the edge of the board.

It would have been the Potters’ 12th 3-pointer of the night. Dullard had one. Five players had two each: Reiman, Maddy Becker, Josi Becker, Dowell, and Shurman.

Kassidy Shurman – she’s the one who caused me all this writing angst. There I was in the bleachers wondering what to write about another runaway game. That’s when the woman next to me said, “You know about Kassidy and the cadavers?”

Uh, excuse me, “WHATTTTT?”

“They go to the Pekin cadaver lab and cut up cadavers,” the woman said.

So afterwards I asked Shurman about cutting up cadavers.

She said, “You start at the back and cut around to the chest and . . . .”

She went on until she was cutting into a hand. “It’s so cool,” she said,

Shurman wants to be a doctor. She figures she’ll be dealing with dead bodies. Might as well start now.

“You want to see some pictures?” she said.

I said, “NOOOO.”

The Martin Luther King Tournament (MLK), which is organized by Galesburg High School, has traditionally provided a great experience for the Morton Lady Potters (25-1).  Traditionally it falls at about the midway point of the high school basketball season, in what has been called the “January Grind”.  All veteran players and coaches are familiar with the January Grind, which refers to the ‘Dog Days’ of the long high school basketball season. Teams are tested for their commitment level, sustained focus, team chemistry, self evaluation and ability to handle any adversity the Grind has to throw at them.

The MLK, which is also sometimes referred to as the “Galesburg MLK Classic”, allows teams to see a variety of competitive teams, which bring with them a wide range of style of play in the middle of their season.  There are teams that like to push the pace of play, teams that want to slow you down, teams that run a lot of set plays and teams that prefer to free lance and break down defenses with their athleticism and constant motion.  Being able to play against many different types of teams has always been beneficial to the Potters, as it has helped prepare them well for post season play.

This year, the Lady Potters faced LaSalle Peru, Lincoln, Peoria High (Central), Peoria Notre Dame and Galesburg High School.   Much like the SFHC, each team presented a different challenge and a different style of play.  All five opponents brought toughness and varying levels of experience and competitiveness.  LaSalle Peru was young and less experienced, so they tried to slow down the pace of play on both ends of the court.  Lincoln and Central both had a mixture of youth and veteran players, but had very different styles of play.  Lincoln played quickly on offense and was more patient and sat back defensively.  Central was the exact opposite, playing slower  and patiently on offense and applying high pressure, in your face tough, physical defense. Notre Dame and Galesburg both tried to run their set offenses and play physical defense against the Lady Potters.

The MLK is rather unique in that games are played over two weekends, typically with one game during the week and is played at a variety of locations.  Morton hosted their first two games on Saturday, January 13th vs LaSalle Peru and Lincoln.  Then travelled to Peoria High on Monday (Martin Luther King Jr. Day) to face the Central Lions.  The Potters then played at Galesburg High School, on Saturday, January 20th vs. Peoria Notre Dame & vs. Galesburg High School.  Because it is a week long tournament, Morton also squeezed in Friday night Mid-Illini Conference games on both Fridays.  The end result was 7 victories for the Lady Potters in 8 days.

Jan 12th (Fri Night) – Morton defeats Metamora 52-43
Jan 13th (Sat Morning) – Morton defeats LaSalle Peru 52-16
Jan 13th (Sat Afternoon) – Morton defeats Lincoln 58-45
Jan 15th (Mon Afternoon) – Morton defeats Peoria High 59-51
Jan 19th (Fri Night) – Morton defeats East Peoria 74-21
Jan 20th (Sat Afternoon) – Morton defeats Notre Dame 56-22
Jan 20th (Saturday Night) – Morton defeats Galesburg 65-46

 

 

Are you starting to grasp the January Grind concept? Well the Lady Potters know all about it and prepare for it. It’s part of the process of building mental toughness for deep post season runs. Not only do you face 7 teams in 8 days at the MLK tournament, you face 7 different officiating crews. Sometimes the officiating crew has as much impact on the outcome of the game as the style of play of your opponent. Some crews are consistent in their officiating, some aren’t. Some allow physical play and hand checking, some don’t.

Some call three seconds in the lane, carrying and traveling (according to the rules) and some don’t. Good teams learn to adjust the way they play accordingly as the officials set the tone for the style of play they allow. Great teams overcome inconsistent officiating and take the game away from the officials. The Lady Potters saw some very good officiating and some suspect officiating over the course of the Jan Grind, but in all cases they played their game and didn’t let the officiating, good or bad, get in the way of winning basketball games in January.

The Lady Potters finished January off with two more big Mid-Illini Conference wins with victories over Dunlap (59-44) on Pink Night at the Potter Dome and then at Pekin on January 27th (77-33). Pink Night 2018 was an extraordinary night.

With the help of the Morton Community, the Lady Potters raised over $6,000 for the Illinois Cancer Care Foundation. 650 Pink Night t-shirts were sold by the team and generous donations from local businesses and individuals accounted for the large sum that was donated. Morton’s State Champion Band performed and the Morton Cheerleaders and Dance team, along with over 1,000 fans made it an electric night! Tenley Dowell was also honored, before the game, for scoring her 1,000th point during the MLK tournament.

Energized by the crowd, the Lady Potters played a great game on both ends of the court. Curiously enough, Dunlap’s coach (Heather Cassidy), elected to press and pressure the Lady Potter reserves the entire 4th quarter with her starters and even called a timeout in the final seconds, but it didn’t seem to matter much. The Lady Potters still won the game by 15 in a game that all 14 Morton Lady Potters got significant playing time and experience.

So now with the January Grind behind them, the Lady Potters will look to keep improving day-by-day and attempt to play their best basketball of the year in February and March. All those games in November, December and January are part of the building process. I think the Lady Potters are about ready to make their March into March.

 

When it’s a 77-33 victory – the Morton High School Lady Potters defeating Pekin tonight – and it comes after a 74-21 victory following 56-22 and 84-11 victories, the poor sportswriter is left scratching his haircut to think of ways to say the same stuff again. But God is good, and God provides, and early in tonight’s game a handsome gentleman took the seat next to me.

“Go easy on our Pekin girls,” he said, and there was a great old friend, Tom Brandt, once a fleet-footed center fielder at Atlanta High School, once a stalwart on the Redwings’ basketball team, now living in Pekin. Two years ago I introduced him at an alumni banquet featuring the class of 1956: “Here to speak for them is Tom Brandt, known back then as ‘Smilie.’ Senior year, on the baseball team, he hit .389. A freshman named Dave Kindred hit .159.”

Tonight’s score was 33-11 midway through the second quarter. That’s when Tom asked about the Potters’ leading scorer, Tenley Dowell. A long-time observer of Pekin High School basketball, Tom had seen Tenley’s father, Troy, when Troy was a star on Dragons’ teams. Now he had seen Tenley score on a layup with her left hand. She had glided through the Pekin defense gracefully and put the shot against the glass so smoothly that someone who had never seen her play would ask, as Tom did:

“Is she left-handed?”

She is when she wants to be. Dowell is a right-hander, but she can move to the rim on the dribble left-handed and once there she can score with either hand.

“My Dad always taught us to dribble with both hands,” she told me later. “And now I’ve done it so long and so much in practice that it does feel natural.”

As Morton built a 40-14 halftime lead, Dowell scored 17 of her game-high 24 points. She did it easily, on two mid-range jumpers, two short floaters, and three layups, two with the off-hand.

Tom and I talked some golf. We talked some basketball. He said he didn’t watch many girls games. So I brought him up to speed on why the Lady Potters are worth a spectator’s time, even on a 77-33 night.

First, they have talent. Second, they know how to play. Third, they play hard the full 1,920 seconds every night. While talent and mastery of fundamentals distinguishes the Lady Potters, the “play hard” element separates them from almost all other teams. Not many girls teams even know how to play hard, let alone do it every second. (Bob Becker, the Morton coach, tonight scribbled a note on a whiteboard for his players: “Max. Effort.” They gave it.)

They play defense as if defense is the most fun a girl can have on a basketball court. (I don’t know how many steals they had tonight, nor do I know how many times a Pekin player just threw the damned thing into the stands to get rid of it before three Potters descended upon her. Whatever the numbers were, they’re the kind of numbers that get you beat 77-33.)

Tom noticed another important thing that is easy to forget if you’ve seen the Potters all year, now 25-1 for the season and on a 22-game winning streak. “I like the way they move without the ball,” he said.

And as the Potters move, so does the ball. It moves until it finds an open man. (Tonight’s example 1: a Bridget Wood pass from the top of the key down the paint to Courtney Jones underneath. Example 2: a Courtney Jones fast ball from the 3-point arc to Dowell on the low block.)

They put pressure on the other team offensively and defensively. The Potters never give the other side an extra breath. Defensively, they dare you to pick up your dribble; you’re dead the second you do. Offensively, they need a minimum of space to get off a 3-pointer. (Five players made a total of nine 3’s tonight, with Kassidy Shurman making four, one in each quarter. “We can all score,” Dowell said. “It make it hard to anybody to guard us.”) Fact.

Here’s another fact. It was 61-24 with 2.2 seconds to play in the third quarter when Bob Becker, for some reason, called a timeout. A timeout up 37? A timeout with 2.2 seconds on the clock? Well, “Max. Effort” applies to the coach, too. He wanted to run a side-court out-of-bounds play because, you never know, you might need to run a side-court out-of-bounds play in a big game down the road.

So Josi Becker took the ball out. Three 3-point shooters ran to her. The post player, Addi Cox, moved into the paint. If all the defenders went with the shooters – as they did – that would leave Cox open for a lob – and it did.

“I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I have to do this,’” the seldom-used reserve said. She caught the lob but missed the short shot. (She did make the Potters’ last bucket of the night, a short one with a minute to play.)

One more Atlanta note. A woman tapped me on the shoulder. She was Max Young’s daughter. Max was another of Atlanta’s best athletes. His daughter, Beth Heitman, lives in Wisconsin, in Hayward, up by Lake Superior, seven hours from Morton. But she is a Potters’ fan, thanks to reading some stuff here.

“We came down to Lincoln to see relatives,” Beth said, “and we had to come over here and see the Potters in person.”

She was smiling, and she bought three copies of “The Unbelievables,” and I was smiling.

Dowell’s 24 points led Morton. Dullard and Shurman had 12 each. Courtney Jones had 9, Josi Becker 6, and Megan Gold 4. Caylie Jones and Maddy Becker had 3 each, and Peyton Dearing and Cox had 2 each.

A wonderful Pink Night in the Potterdome. A thousand people there. Dance team. Cheerleaders. Pep Band. Lights down for introductions, players ran onto the court in the dark waving glowsticks. Lights up, they gave the Illinois Cancer Care Foundation $5,000. They clambered into the bleachers with pink roses for cancer survivors. We again saw the video of Mary Schultz, three years gone, singing The Star Spangled Banner, as she did when her daughters were players, as she will do for all of us always.

It’s a basketball night and it’s more than basketball. It’s a reminder of cancer’s reach. Two places down from me on the third row behind the players’ bench, a white-haired woman took a pink rose from Courtney Jones, a rosy-cheeked sophomore. “These kids have big hearts,” Bob Becker, the Morton High School Lady Potters’ coach, said. “On a night like this, they realize they’re fighting for a cause bigger than themselves. Just a great night altogether, a meaningful night. And then the kids did their basketball job.”

It was Morton 59, Dunlap 44.

Never a doubt, and no surprise in that, for the Potters are playing at a high level. Nor was it any surprise on this night when the Potters kicked it up a gear. They have made that their habit, too. From working with simple competence, they fly into brilliance. Quick-striking runs leave opponents wondering what just happened. In tonight’s five-minute run ending midway in the third quarter, the Potters did it with daggers from afar. They didn’t make one 3, or two 3’s. They didn’t make even three or four 3’s. They made six of ‘em. They outscored Dunlap 20-4 to build a 25-point lead.

The lead was only 27-18 late in the second quarter when Courtney Jones, the rosy-cheeked one, made a 3 from the top of the key. There was 1:02 showing on the clock. Exactly 39 seconds later, the ball came back to Jones outside the arc on the left side. Here she did a very unsophomore-like thing. She didn’t look to pass. She didn’t bounce it. She caught and shot, the way the senior stars do.

“I made the first one,” she said later, “so I thought, ‘Hopefully, this one goes in, too.’”

It did.

Bob Becker wants his Potters to dominate the early minutes of every third quarter.

Tonight they did.

Given Jones’s quick six points, the Potters opened the third with a 33-20 lead. With one Dunlap interruption, the Potters ran the score to 47-22. Lindsey Dullard opened with a 3. Tenley Dowell followed with a 4-foot floater of such imagination that it seemed launched from behind the board. Then Dullard came with another 3, and Kassidy Shurman took over. She made one 3 from the left corner and another from the right side. In exactly 4 minutes and 37 seconds, Morton did its 20-4 run.

Here Dunlap called timeout. One note-taker scribbled a note, “Like, they’ve got a plan?”

They had no rally-from-25-down plan. Morton, the three-times-running state 3A champion, now has won 21 straight games this season. They are 24-1 overall and 10-0 in the Mid-Illini. Reaching into last season, they have won 39 of their last 40 games. In their three state championship seasons and this one, they are 124-9.

They’re the kind of team that has a plan. For instance, Dunlap has a good inside player, Christina Britter, 6-foot-1, mobile, strong, a Division-1 commit. Morton’s plan was to defeat Britter with Caylie Jones, a 5-foot-8 senior.

“I would front her,” Caylie Jones said later. “But they key was to take a charge and get her in foul trouble.”

One minute and 22 seconds into the game, Britter thought to do her best offensive move, a spin move in the paint.

Guess what? Caylie Jones knew that. She overplayed to the spin-move side. And here came Britter knocking her down. A charging foul.

At 4:11 of the second quarter, Jones did it again. A second charging foul against Britter.

By the time Morton’s lead was 47-22, Britter had not scored.

“They always have a great, structured defense,” she said. “They keep me moving.” That’s a compliment, for Britter meant that Jones was so effective in denying entry passes that she could not stand still, accept passes, and make her offensive moves.

For Morton, the game’s only nervous-making moment came with 2:39 to play in the third quarter. Undercut on a rebound, the Potters’ leading scorer, Tenley Dowell, fell hard on her back. Her head seemed to strike the hardwood, and the sharpest sound was of her elbows hitting the floor. She lay there, dazed, in pain, until rising to walk to the trainer’s room. She was not seriously injured.

“My ponytail cushioned my head,” she said, smiling. And it was after the fall that she made her two 3’s for the night, a sign that all was well with her elbows.

Dowell led Morton’s scoring with 18. Dullard had 12 and Courtney Jones 10. Shurman and Josi Becker had 6 each, Maddy Becker 3, Caylie Jones 2, and Megan Gold 2.

Here comes Lindsey Dullard. She’s flying. She’s flying insde the 3-point arc. She’s two steps past the top of the key. Now she catches a pass, at full speed, three steps in now, and . . . this is true, I swear . . . she suddenly gets bigger. She’s no longer a skinny sophomore. She’s big in the shoulders and big in the arms. Now she’s rising above the kids, flying in to finish, her left hand practically at the rim. She lays a shot softly against the board for a bucket that meant little in the moment but suggested that someday soon, very soon, Lindsey Dullard will make buckets that mean a lot.

The day’s good news: as expected, the Morton High School Lady Potters won the Galesburg Winter Classic tonight. In the afternoon they beat Peoria Notre Dame, 56-22. In the evening they beat Galesburg, 65-46.

The better news: They Potters now have won 20 games in a row, and at 23-1 they’re ahead of the pace they set in winning any of their three straight state championships, seasons they went 33-3, 33-3, and 34-2. Even in the last stage of the grueling “Gauntlet” – four games in four days on successive weekends – the Potters were efficient offensively, merciless defensively, and so relentlessly aggressive with pressure at both ends that they wore people out, first physically and then psychically. As Peoria Notre Dame coach Layne Langhoff put it: “They blew right by us.”

The best news: Lindsey Dullard.

Here she is against Galesburg, late in the game, coming off a back screen in a play the Potters call “Hammer.”

On the right wing, the little guard Kassidy Shurman has the ball. It’s her job, if possible, to deliver a pass to Dullard breaking to the basket. If there’s no line of sight to Dullard, Shurman can back the ball out and start over.

But she sees Dullard running free.

She lobs an alley-oop pass.

Without breaking stride, Dullard reaches high for the ball and in one leap kisses it off the glass, every so softly, two points, the Potters’ last bucket of the game.

Her coach, Bob Becker, who put the play in only this week in practice, comes off the bench in celebration. And it’s a contest as to who is smiling the biggest, Dullard or Shuman, for these Potters are having themselves some fun these days. Even Galesburg fans recognized they had been in the presence of something special, one old guy harrumphing to a friend, “What do you expect? They are all All-Americans.”

To say Dullard was the Potters’ leading scorer in both games is to say not much, really. She had 13 against Peoria Notre Dame and 24 against Galesburg. More important, she demonstrated a growing confidence in every facet of her game. Once helpless as a rebounder, she now is dependable. As an inside defender, she has learned to deny entry passes and has become an adept shot-blocker. She plays the point on the Potters’ full-court press and, with her 6-foot-1 length, confounds ball-handlers who have trouble moving passes either over or around her. Offensively, she is a load for any defense; she built her early reputation as a 3-point shooter, and that reputation has been affirmed, but she has added – as shown on that slashing drive against Notre Dame – moves to the basket that make her a double-threat.

Look at the way she scored against Galesburg . . .

Four 3’s (one after blocking a shot at the other end). A floater from 6 feet. A leaner from 6 feet on a drive. Three other layups created by drives in the paint. The “Hammer” alley-oop. To be generous to Dullard, we might even partially-credit her with a Courtney Jones put-back basket; Dullard’s 3-point try landed with such a shooter’s touch that it took an extra bounce on the rim and allowed Jones to go up after Galesburg’s rebounders had come down.

Afterwards, I asked Dullard, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much she thought she had improved from the first day of practice to today.

“About 9,” she said.

“She was awesome tonight,” Becker said. “That play in the Notre Dame game – I saw a little bit of ‘Beast Mode.’”

Morton led Notre Dame only 22-12 at halftime. It then went on a 26-2 run in the third quarter with Dullard scoring 10 points, all on driving layups. “The way we played defensively,” Becker said, “allowed us to play the tempo offense we want. In that kind of game, we’re dangerous.”

Like Notre Dame, Galesburg hung with Morton for a while. It trailed only 20-17 with 5:53 to play in the first half. But, like Notre Dame, Galesburg crumpled under Morton’s constant attacks at both ends. In the next 8 minutes of game action, Morton outscored Galesburg 20-2 and led 40-19. Dullard had 7 points in that game-deciding run.

Morton’s scoring against Notre Dame: Dullard 13. Tenley Dowell 10, Josi Becker and Caylie Jones 9 apiece, Courtney Jones 5, Peyton Dearing 4, Bridget Wood 3, Megan Gold 2, and Addi Cox 1.

Against Galesburg: Dullard 24, Dowell 17, Becker and Shurman 8 each, Courtney Jones 6, Caylie Jones 2.

Two years ago, on January 22, 2016, in one of those cosmic mysteries that make life interesting, the East Peoria High School girls basketball team defeated Morton’s Lady Potters, 37-35. Since that night, the teams have met four times and Morton has won all four games — by scores of 90-33, 80-33, 84-11, and, tonight, 74-21.

I dunno, y’think the Potters remember two years ago?

Maybe they remember a night three years ago. They won, 54-34, despite the East Peorians committing a dozen fouls so flagrantly that Morton would have been justified in walking off the court before someone was injured.

For high school players those events are likely forgotten. Homecomings and proms, driver’s licenses and first dates, SAT’s and college essays – life comes at teenagers in a hurry.

But old folks remember.

A friend told me there’s one thing she likes about East Peoria.

“Leaving,” she said.

Another friend, a Peorian, said he wouldn’t mind if East Peoria slipped into the Illinois River and bobbed up around Goofy Ridge or Havana.

“No,” I said. My mother lived and fished at Goofy Ridge. It deserves better.

Wait. Let’s be fair. … A cute server at the Bob Evans restaurant once slipped me two extra slices of that great banana nut bread. . . . At Fon du Lac golf course this summer, I made a birdie. … The Farmdale Reservoir – beautiful hiking trails.

Enough of that. Have you ever tried to exit off westbound I- 74 and get down to Washington Street on your way to East Peoria High School? You can be run over by a tractor-trailer on the three or four streets curling into each other like spaghetti at Avanti’s. Then you come to a stop light. There’s a sign: DO NOT STOP ON TRACKS. Because you can get run over by a train.

Anyway, no. There has been no payback at work. Morton’s coach, Bob Becker, has used the games virtually as practice sessions, playing his starters a quarter and a half, giving time to every player on the roster.

No payback – but, it says here, plenty of karma. However good the East Peorians were on that inexplicable night two years ago, they have been that bad since. Any five of the 14 Morton players could have won tonight’s game. It was 19-0 before East Peoria scored. It was 31-2 before East Peoria scored again. It was 52-9 before East Peoria got into double figures.

The Potters dominated the game the way they dominated the team’s first meeting. They scored from everywhere in every way, on 8 3-pointers, on a dozen breakaways, on a dozen second-chance buckets. When their merciless defenders weren’t baiting the East Peorians into foolish passes, they just took the ball from them and ran the other way. It’s what three-time state champions on an 18-game winning streak, with a 21-1 season record, do to teams that come in 1-20.

The game’s only distinguishing moment came with 4:12 left in the second quarter. That’s when Maddy Becker was told she couldn’t play, that her uniform wasn’t legal.

Because her uniform shorts are so long they reach her knees, Becker, a sophomore, had done what many high school girls do. She rolled her waist band to bring the shorts up. That’s one of the silly no-no’s in Illinois girls basketball. So a referee, spotting the terrible infraction immediately, told Becker she couldn’t come into the game. The referee also ruled out another Potters sub, Olivia Remmert, who, like Becker, had committed the same fashion faux pas.

“We didn’t turn the waist bands ‘out,’ because that would show the drawstring, so we roll them ‘in,’” Remmert said. Then the girls arrange their jerseys so a couple inches hang loose and hide the rolled-in waist band. But there was no hiding on this night, what with the eagle-eyed zebra ruling both Becker and Remmert out of the game.

How’d Becker feel about it?

“Angry,” she said.

Both Becker and Remmert returned in the second half. Their shorts were longer.

Tenley Dowell led Morton’s scoring with 17. Josi Becker had 15. Caylie Jones had 8, Lindsey Dullard 6, Maddy Becker and Kathryn Reiman 5 each. Megan Gold and Courtney Jones had 4, Bridget Wood and Kassidy Shurman 3 each, Petyon Dearing and Claire Kraft 2 each.

I’m trying to be a grown-up here. But, really. The Morton High School Lady Potters defeated Peoria High this afternoon, 59-51, in Galesburg’s Martin Luther King Winter Classic tournament. For a half and more, it was a basketball game. After that, with Peoria’s desperate defenders clawing and scratching, the game devolved into … oh, I dunno … let’s call it a mash-up of basketball, karate, jiu jitsu, and taekwando, whatever taekwando is.

The keep-it-in-perspective response to such a game would be to say the Potters won their 17th straight game and raised their season record to 20-1 by beating a strong team on its home court before a partisan crowd. The level-headed response would be to say the Potters will learn from the experience and put it to good use in trying to win a fourth straight state championship. A fair and balanced commentator might even praise Peoria for its speed, its grit, its determination, and its commitment, perhaps unstated but real, to the concept of asymmetric warfare.

That would be the grown-up way to go.

But I need to rant.

I hate clawing, scratching defenders. By clawing and scratching, I mean clawing and scratching. This is not a sportswriterly analogy. I mean clawing with one’s hands and scratching with one’s hands. Great defense is beautiful. Clawing, scratching defense is ugly. The only thing uglier is a referee who decides there’s so much clawing and scratching going on that if he started calling fouls, he’d never get home for dinner, so he swallows his whistle rather than interrupt the mayhem. This game had three whistle-swallowers. With a minute to play, Peoria had been called for eight second-half fouls. The zebras passed on the other 50.

I feel some better.

Morton led, 41-15, at 5:41 of the third quarter. That’s when Peoria’s press went into frenzy mode. They trapped ball-handlers, they clawed at the ball whenever it stopped in a Potter’s hands, and they scratched it loose often enough to cut Morton’s lead to 10 points, 50-40, with 5:01 to play. In little more than a quarter’s time, they had done to Morton what Morton so often has done to others. They ran off 25 points to the Potters’ 9.

I suppose Peoria High people liked the 25-9 rally. I hated it. I hated it because it was chaos. It was throw the thing against the glass and see what happens in the no-holds-barred scrum under the board. It was chop at somebody’s arms and hope the ball falls loose and the referees don’t see it. It’s what you do if you have no real weapons and the other guy has bombs. You attack unconventionally. You do things nobody expects done. You fight from the shadows. You become guerillas fighters. It’s asymmetrical warfare.

Peoria came in with a 16-6 record. It has big, strong, quick, athletic players, the kind that have bedeviled Morton in exactly the same way the last three years. So, sure, they had a chance today against Morton. But the three-time state champions played superbly for a half and three minutes into the third quarter. It was 15-8 after a quarfter and 33-13 at the half. That margin was built mainly on a 19-3 run in almost 8 minutes that featured three consecutive Josi Becker layups on full-court drives through Peoria’s press. The lead reached 41-15 on eight straight points early in the third quarter – on 3’s by Josi Becker and Kassidy Shurman, and a 15-footer by Lindsey Dullard.

Whatever Peoria decided in a timeout there, worked. In little more than a minute, the Lions scored eight straight points. Then came another of the game’s signature ugly moments.

A Peoria defender, flying toward Josi Becker, struck her across the head, perhaps with a hand, perhaps an elbow. The blow caused Becker to touch her face, as if to be sure all the parts were still there. From a row high in the Morton fans’ section, into the silence of no-whistle-this-time-either, someone shouted, “They tore her HEAD off!” Wasn’t me, but as they say in Congress, I am proud to associate myself with my colleague’s remarks.

Throughout the game’s last 13 minutes, when Peoria outscored Morton, 36-18, its press frazzled the Potters’ ball-handlers and its indefatigable offensive rebounders kept the ball bouncing toward the rim. (Twelve of Peoria’s 14 second-half baskets came in the paint, 4 on put-back rebounds.) Suddenly, the Potters’ lead was only 50-40.

But whatever doubts Morton might have let creep in were ushered out in the next minute. The Potters made two plays that distinguish good basketball teams from chaotic basketball teams.

First, Caylie Jones drew a charge (her second of the game) at the Peoria end that gave the Potters possession with 4:20 to play. Then Tenley Dowell, slashing to the basket, put up a left-handed shot that kissed the board gently and fell in. While she avoided all Peoria tacklers this time, she nevertheless was fouled. The free throw made it 53-40 with 3:51 to play. I made a note. “Safe now,” for the next time Morton loses a 13-point lead in the fourth quarter will be the first time in my memory.

Dowell led Morton’s scoring with 15 points. (Incidentally, her fourth point of the night gave her 1,000 for her career. The junior will be honored at the Potters’ next home game, Tuesday, Jan. 23.) Josi Becker scored 13, Shurman and Caylie Jones had 8 each, Courtney Jones 6, Dullard 4, Maddy Becker 3, and Megan Gold 2.

So here is the deal, the Morton Lady Potters, ranked #1 in Class 3A by the Associated Press (AP), are 19-1 on the season, 8-0 in the Mid-Illini Conference, State Farm Holiday Classic Champions, and of course 3x Defending State Champions that have won 16 games in a row.  Most of them by at least a dozen points.  They have run through the first half of the Mid-Illini Conference season like a hot knife through butter and haven’t lost a Mid-Illini game in 722 days (January 22, 2016).  That would equate to 27 straight conference wins. That’s pretty impressive, but I heard a critic say the other day – “well Morton is in a weak conference, so they don’t have to play anyone”.  Morton’s dominance probably triggers that thought in people outside the conference, because well, what else are they going to say.  There are some ways to measure how good Morton has been so far this season however, and I’ll lay them out for you.

I really can’t say how good some of the other Class 3A teams from around the state are, because I haven’t seen many of them play this year and other than the AP and MaxPreps, there really isn’t another comparison method, other than traveling around the state to watch them all play.  MaxPreps is a national high school ranking service that use a statistical computer formula to rank teams from all across the country (somewhat like the BCS ranking computer formula in college football)  and results are filtered down to provide rankings by State and by Class. Their formula weighs wins and losses and factors in a strength of schedule (who you play, your opponents ranking and your opponents strength of schedule).  Not exactly an exact science, but other than the AP rankings and the “eyeball test”, it’s the best we got.

So what does MaxPreps have to say about the Morton Lady Potters, the teams around the State and the Mid-Illini?  Well as of their last ranking 1/12/18 (rankings are updated on Tuesdays and Fridays throughout the season), MaxPreps had Morton as the #3 team (regardless of Class) in Illinois and #2 team in Class 3A. Peoria Richwoods at 18-1 (Morton’s only loss) is ranked #1 in the State regardless of Class.  Rounding out the top 10 in Class 3A include; #3 – Nazareth Academy 19-1 (unboundaried Chicago private school), #4 – Effingham 14-1, #5 – Charleston 17-1, #6 – Breese Central 17-2, #7 – Glenbard South (Glen Ellyn) 12-1,  #8 – Civic Memorial (Bethalto) 18-1, #9 – Kaneland (Maple Park) 13-2 and #10 Sycamore 16-3.

Now here is the part of the MaxPreps rankings that I found most interesting in Class 3A.  Ranked #11 is Dunlap, #12 is Canton, #14 is Lincoln, #17 is Washington, #24 is Metamora. So there are currently 5 Mid-Illini teams ranked in the top 25 in MaxPreps Class 3A rankings.  That does’t sound like the Mid-Illini is that weak to me.  Here is how some of the other Lady Potter opponents this year rank in Class 3A: Galesburg #47, Champaign Central #48, LaSalle Peru #88, Limestone #105, East Peoria #125 out of 168 ranked Class 3A teams in Illinois.  Class 4A opponents: Normal Community #6, St. Ignatius #25, Normal West #39, Peoria High #40, Bloomington #52, Pekin #92 out of 169 ranked Class 4A teams in Illinois.

Now I’ll repeat, rankings before March 4th mean absolutely diddly-squat.  However, I think that it helps us see that maybe Morton has been tested a little bit and maybe the Mid-Illini Conference is not as “weak” as I heard someone profess the other day. Also, do you remember the Monroe Cheesmakers that battled the Lady Potters back at ICC on December 2nd?  They are currently 13-2 and ranked #3 in Wisconsin’s Division 2 AP Poll and have only lost to Wisconsin’s #1 team (Beaver Dam) other than their loss to the Potters. Wisconsin has 5 Divisions with Division 1 being the largest schools and Division 5 being the smallest schools. Let’s factor that into our eyeball test.

Now that’s the good news for Morton’s Mid-Illini opponents (they are not that bad).  The bad news for them is that Morton is improving!  Game-by-game and day-by-day the Lady Potters are getting more familiar with the system that IBCA Hall of Fame Coach Becker and his staff are implementing.  They are getting better at the little things that make a big difference.  They are getting better at communicating on offense and defense.  They are getting better at finding the open player and they are getting better at competing.  Just what Lady Potter opponents wanted to hear I’m sure, but it’s the truth.  This team was better in December than they were in November and are visibly better in January than they were in December.  That’s what my eyeball test is telling me.  Now we want see what they become in February and March!!!!