Uniontown pulls off upset”We saved our best for last,” Uniontown coach Jason Winfrey said in the moments after his Lady Red Raiders handed playoff-bound Southmoreland a 61-55 loss in the Section 3-AAA finale for both teams Thursday night at A.J. Everhart Memorial Gymnasium.
Katie Fisher led Uniontown with 19 points off the bench. She hit five three-pointers, including four in the third quarter that proved to be key to the victory. Courtney Sanner added 13 points and seven rebounds for (6-15, 5-9) Uniontown, while Marissa Voytek was all over the floor with 10 points, 11 rebounds, a blocked shot and four assists. “We’ve been practicing passing and cutting all season, but we really emphasized it this week,” Winfrey said. “Really, that’s the game of basketball, passing and cutting to the basket. Tonight, we finally did it. We ran our game plan for the full 32 minutes.”
Winfrey and his assistants came up with a defense that proved effective for most of the night against the (16-6, 9-5) Lady Scots, who enter the playoffs as the second-place team in the section.
“We created a defense called ’23 Diamond,'” Winfrey said. “It is designed to keep the ball away from Vanessa Abel. Once she passed it, we tried not to let her get it back. It kind of looks like a zone, but the other part of it was to deny Kelly Rollinson the ball, too. We ran it pretty well, but I think we got a little tired in the third and fourth quarter.”
That’s when Rollinson scored the bulk of her game-high 21 points. She had been limited to three in the first half. Abel, the sophomore who can score from anywhere on the floor, finished with 19 after managing only six in the first half.
“We were still riding high from the other night,” Southmoreland coach Brian Pritts said of his team’s 62-51 home win over Yough Monday. “We played very well against Yough, but tonight, we couldn’t get in sync, couldn’t get in a rhythm. We just weren’t firing on all cylinders.
“We were too passive, not nearly as aggressive as we needed to be until it was too late. Uniontown did an exceptional job on defense the whole game.”
So well, in fact, that the Lady Scots managed only four field goals in the first half and only one of those came in the second quarter, when Uniontown took control of the game with a 19-4 scoring edge to take a 25-19 lead into the locker room.
Trailing 14-6 at the end of the first quarter, Uniontown scored the first six points of the second quarter in a 10-1 run that gave the hosts a 21-15 lead.
Southmoreland came out of the locker room playing more aggressively and closed to within three, 28-25, with 6:25 still to play in the quarter. Fisher took over from there with three-pointers on three straight trips down the floor, the last one lifting Uniontown’s lead to 38-27.
“Katie came off the bench and did what she does best, which is shoot the ball,” Winfrey said. “She was the difference in the game. She was our spark off the bench.”
But she wasn’t out there alone. Winfrey went up and down his roster complimenting every girl who got in the game.
“The last two or three games, Marissa Voytek has really stepped up for us and I thought Annie Hodge played a good game tonight, as well. All of them did. Tonight was the first time we played as a team all year.”
Pritts hopes this game can serve as a wake-up call for his team, as it awaits its WPIAL playoff fate from Tuesday night’s pairings meeting.
“I think it can help us, but I was hoping it would go the other way, that we could play well again and have some momentum going into the playoffs,” Pritts said. “It all depends on how they feel in the morning, when they look in the mirror and see if they can overcome this and win in the playoffs.”
For Uniontown, the season is over. The work, though, is just beginning. Only one senior played on Winfrey’s team this year, so the future looks bright. Where does it start?
“In the weight room,” Winfrey said. “The weight room and undergrads, that’s where we’re headed.”