ALL THE MARBLES: Trinity holds off Clements to earn first state title
The Trinity Wildcats earned the school’s first girls state basketball championship on Friday, defeating Clements at the Legacy Arena. (Tim Gayle)
By TIM GAYLE
BIRMINGHAM -- The fouls were mounting and the minutes were running out.
With Trinity trailing by eight points as the fourth quarter opened in the 3A championship game with Clements, the Wildcats were in desperate need of an offensive spark.
Not surprisingly, it was the school’s all-time career scoring leader who supplied it.
Emma Kate Smith, held to three points on 1 of 7 shooting through the first three quarters, fired in a 23-foot shot to pull the Wildcats within three points and get the momentum changed, took a pass from her sister Maddie and launched another deep 3 to give her team the lead, then threw in a 24-foot bomb that finished off the Colts in a 52-48 victory in Legacy Arena on Friday.
And just like that, a team that had trailed for all but one minute and 47 seconds of the first three and a half quarters was hoisting a blue championship trophy in front of its fans.
“We missed a lot of shots that I think we normally hit that allowed them to keep that lead,” Trinity coach Blake Smith said. “Then Emma Kate knocks one down. She got hot and that’s some beautiful stuff. That 3 she hit from about 10 feet behind that line, that was beautiful.”
The Wildcats had battled foul trouble for most of the afternoon in a game that was tightly called by officials. Clements managed to extend the lead to eight points before the Colts encountered the same problem, taking both teams out of an offensive rhythm.
Trinity (32-2) ran into trouble quickly as point guard Maddie Smith picked up four personal fouls in the first quarter, finding her way to the end of the bench for the remainder of the first half.
“Maddie’s our engine,” Blake Smith said. “When you take her off the floor -- four fouls in the first quarter of a championship game, our most needed player in some ways -- it’s a difficult thing to overcome.”
Francie Morris and Mya Moskowitz were also slowed by foul trouble, keeping the Wildcats from putting much defensive pressure on the Colts.
“Maddie had four fouls in the first quarter and that was one of our goals, to attack them,” Clements coach Shane Childress said. “Either we stopped attacking them -- which I don’t think we did -- or the game just got changed by the refereeing. That’s up to y’all (to determine), I don’t care about all that, but that was our game plan going in. I don’t know how many fouls they had in the first half, but either they adjusted great or something changed because I know we kept going to the goal.”
Moskowitz, the tournament’s most valuable player, followed up on Tuesday’s 16-point performance with a solid 13-point effort on Friday, giving the Wildcats some hope by being a disruptive force on defense and a steady presence in the paint. She also followed Emma Kate Smith’s fourth-quarter bombardment with a 3-pointer of her own that was crucial in allowing the Wildcats to maintain their lead late.
“If I get defeated, it’s only going to hurt my team so I have to stay (positive) for them,” Moskowitz said. “This just means so much. We have the best senior (Emma Kate Smith) ever, along with Jayden (Mitchell) and Hannah (Hert). They’re all good to us and I was just like, ‘I can’t get discouraged, I just have to keep fighting.’”
Clements, which prides itself on a fast brand of transition basketball, also discovered how disruptive Moskowitz can be on the defensive end of the floor.
“We knew they were going to jump (into the passing lanes) when we spread the ball,” Childress said. “We had to try to get the right person to jump on our ball screens. We kept having to adjust to get the person I wanted to jump, because when Mya comes out and jumps you, you’ve got a big D-I athlete coming at you, so we had to try to adjust that and it took us a little while.”
Still, Childress had to be happy entering the fourth quarter. Suddenly, his team that had converted 9 of 17 field goals in the second and third quarters went more than seven minutes without a point as Trinity’s offense started raining 3s.
“They got the momentum and there wasn’t much we could do,” Childress said. “Very rarely do I use all my timeouts, but I kept using them a lot of times to rest us. But we knew how good No. 12 (Emma Kate Smith) could shoot. And Lilly (Smith) did a great job. We had to pick our poison and she gave us some poison (with eight points). That was eight big ones.”
Lilly, a seventh grader, scored four points in the third quarter and four more in the fourth, contributing a game-high nine rebounds as well to keep the Wildcats within striking distance. That’s when Emma Kate caught fire, launching shots before the defenders picked her up in coverage.
“I think she hit 13 in a game before,” Childress said. “We knew how good she could shoot. When it went up, I was like, ‘What is she? … Aw, shoot, what did she just do?’ That was a big one. That was huge.”
Joining Moskowitz on the all-tournament team were Morris, Emma Kate Smith and Maddie Smith of Trinity, along with Leah Childress and Taylor Farrar of Clements. Childress had 15 points for the Colts (29-6), followed by Farrar with 12.
Emma Kate Smith’s 14 points put the finishing touches on a brilliant six-year career with 2,270 points. More importantly, it secured the school its first girls’ basketball championship in its sixth trip to the state tournament.
“I didn’t shoot as much in the first half,” she said. “Dad always says, even when I get discouraged and feel like I’m not making them, ‘keep shooting because a shooter’s going to shoot and it’s going to fall eventually.’”