Girls basketball: Keystone refuses to succumb to pressure, fights back after letting lead slip away

STOW — Keystone had just watched a 10-point lead dissipate under the full-court and trapping defense of Warrensville Heights on Wednesday night in a Division III regional semifinal at Stow-Munroe Falls High School. Panic time? Not with the championship DNA the Wildcats have carried with them all season. A Brooklyn Barber 3-pointer put the Wildcats in front 32-22 to start the second half but Warrensville Heights' pressure started to make a difference. Keystone turned the ball over eight times in the quarter and the once-comfortable lead turned into a big-time deficit as the clock wound down to end the third quarter. Warrensville led 44-39 lead with eight minutes to play and had all the momentum in the world on its side. What did Keystone coach Rocky Houston say to his team at the end of the quarter? "Keep playing basketball, that's all we have to do," Barber said her coach told them. "Keep our confidence up. We knew they would start pressuring us. It was just a matter of fighting through it and limiting our turnovers." The Wildcats did a pretty decent job of that in the final quarter. It was Warrensville Heights that felt the pressure. Keystone, after a dreadful third quarter in which it was outscored 22-10 to fall behind, came out swinging in the final eight minutes. "It was one of those things where we had to get settled down," Houston said. "We were down so we had to change defensively. I told the girls we're going to the defense we play all the time. Warrensville struggled against it and we got some deflections and we got some steals." Barber scored on a layup on the first possession. Vivian Cassell followed with another layup and Jessica Forthofer, as she had done consistently all game, found a lane inside to score another basket and suddenly Keystone was back on top, 45-44, with four minutes left. It went back-and-forth from there but the Wildcats weren't going to back down. Forthofer's drive to the basket with 42 seconds left put Keystone up 51-50, and Cassell followed that with a free throw with 8.6 seconds remaining. Warrensville Heights called its last timeout with 3.1 seconds left but Forthofer read the pass inside and tipped it away to Madyson Sokolowski to seal the verdict and send the Wildcats into Saturday's championship game against Chippewa. Forthofer had arguably her best game of the season, scoring 20 points on 9-of-12 shooting from the field and grabbing 10 rebounds. She made both her free throws and played most of the fourth quarter with four fouls. She took a charge with about four minutes left that could have possibly been her fifth foul. "I was like straight up and fall back," she said. "They ended up calling it. I was trying to be smart on that play. I knew it would be a contact game. I knew I had to work through the contact and push myself to get to the rim. My team depends on me getting the rebounds. That's my job." "We did exactly what we needed to do," Houston said. "We started the game the way we planned. The third quarter didn't go the way we had hoped it would go but I couldn't be more proud of what the girls did." Contact Tim Gebhardt at (440) 329-7135 or timothygeb@msn.com.