Walled Lake Central holds off fourth-quarter Lakeland rally
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WHITE LAKE >> The way his offense exploded in the third quarter, Walled Lake Central coach Bob Schopf wasn’t sure he’d have to sweat the result too much in the fourth, especially given the way the Vikings play defense.
When host Lakeland came roaring back with a 10-0 run to start the fourth, all but erasing the Vikings’ lead, though, Schopf certainly could never let on to his young squad that he WAS sweating it before they finally managed to close out a 29-25 win.
“There’s no question. There’s no question. We even had a conversation before the game that we have to remember the age of our kids. These aren’t juniors and seniors. These aren’t seasoned vets. Of all those kids I’m talking about, only two of them were varsity players last year. We have three brand-new sophomores and a freshman to the varsity,” Schopf said of trying to present a calm front to his kids, amid the chaos of a suddenly-evaporated double-digit lead.
“This is brand-new. Coming to someone else’s gym, having them come back on you, varsity basketball — Lakeland’s a heck of a team. … We’re a little wet behind the ears, and you saw eyes like saucers. We had an overand-back, we had travels. But you know what? All of those things were our young kids. Abby White and Abbey Renner, our two seniors were the ones that handled the ball. It wasn’t always pretty, but they did what they had to do. Bottom line, that’s it. Man-to-man can be very difficult to play against at the high school level. It’s not our strength. They are a great man-to-man team. We found a way. We found a way tonight.”
The Vikings might have only scored two buckets in the fourth quarter, but it was just enough to hold off Lakeland, ensuring Central of no worse than second place in the Lakes Valley Conference’s final standings.
Mathematically, the Vikings (7-2, 7-1 LVC) still have a shot at sharing the conference crown with South Lyon East (10-4, 7-0). The Cougars clinched a share of their first-ever league title with Wednesday’s 43-25 win over rival South Lyon, but still have one ‘official’ LVC game — against Waterford Mott on Monday — left to play.
In any other year, though, the Vikings would have their destiny in their own hands. They lost the first meeting with East, 57-42, back on Feb. 23, with the rematch slated for next Thursday.
This year, though, rather than play a double roundrobin format, as a nod to the potential of losing games to COVID, the LVC is only counting the first league meeting between each pair of teams as the ‘official’ league contest.
“I give East a ton of credit. They laid it on us. We’re going to get another shot at them next Thursday, which is sorta fun. They’re coming to our place,” Schopf said. “If you had said to me, before the season had started, when we were quarantined the first week, ‘God, with a week of the season to go, you’re going to be 7-1 in the league, and second place, and you’re the (Walled Lake) City champs, and you’d beaten your rivals … I would’ve taken it in a heartbeat, because we were such a wild card. We just get better every day.”
The Eagles (7-6, 4-3 LVC) also came into this week with a shot at a share of the title, but needed more help — two East losses — to make their math add up. Even when East eliminated Lakeland from contention for the
title with Wednesday’s win, the Eagles were still playing for a share of second with Central on Friday.
“I knew. I didn’t really talk to the girls too much about it, other than we had three games this week, and take them one at a time. We knew we ended with Milford and Central, tough, tough defensive games, so it was going to be tough to score. But in the back of my mind, my goal — I didn’t think East would lose — my goal was ‘Let’s get second place.’ Let’s tie for second. Even if we won tonight, we’d have been tied with them. I put that out to the girls that, hey, we haven’t had a lot of respect for our program over the last couple of years … but maybe that could’ve been the thing that said ‘Hey, Lakeland’s ready to roll,’” Lakeland coach Mike Leithem said. “So that’s why, effort-wise, just for those four minutes (was disappointing). You take those out of the equation, and I think this is a back-andforth game, instead of us having to get back into it.”
Those four minutes he referred to were the first four of the second half, when Central went on an 11-0 run, ostensibly blowing open what had been a nipand-tuck, defensive-minded LVC game, one that had the
Vikings up just two at half, 12-10.
“That third quarter — I was disappointed. We’re way better than we showed on the defensive end. They do a fantastic job of slowing you down and making you play that pace. Our goal was to defend, rebound and run. Well, you can’t run if you don’t get stops. I called a timeout, and that’s one of the few times I’ve really gotten loud this year. We didn’t have any heart, we didn’t play tough, and that wasn’t what we’d been doing this year, and I was disappointed,” Leithem said. “I told our coaches, ‘A 10-point lead against them, is like a 20-point lead, because they’re just going to delay it down there (the offensive end), they’re going to slow you down down here (the defensive end). Credit to our girls for not giving up, but we’re old enough now that we gotta know that we can’t do that against good teams.”
Schopf had joked with Leithem that the first team to 30 would win.
“At halftime, I said to coach, ‘Hey, race you to 30.’ It ended 29-25. Just a classic high school basketball game,” Schopf said, noting that he’d made a few adjustments at the half to help spur the run. “We talked about being strong with the ball, not melting to their pressure. We mixed it up on defense, to take away their shooters a little bit.”
The Vikings led 25-12 headed to the fourth quarter after a 13-2 advantage in the third, but the Eagles turned the tables, running off the first five buckets of the fourth, cutting their deficit down to just three, 2522, on Molly Libby’s putback to finish off a two-onone break.
After Kylei Anderson finally got Central on the board in the fourth, with a driving bucket to make it 27-22 with 2:02 left, Jenna Baer’s 3-pointer for Lakeland cut the deficit back to just two, 27-25, with 1:24 remaining.
It would be the last offense for the Eagles, who had their momentum slowed with a turnover on another fast break. After Renner scored down low off an inbounds play with 35.4 seconds left, padding the lead back to four, 29-25, the Eagles turned it over on their two remaining offensive chances.
“You spend that much effort getting back into something, and then you have a bad pass turn into a turnover, it’s kind of deflating for us,” Leitheim said. “End of the day, we had some energy come into the game, and pick us up a little bit, and made our run, but didn’t have enough gas to finish it.”
Anderson finished with 10 points to lead the Vikings in scoring, while Libby had 10 to lead Lakeland, and Grace Goodnough — who had six points in the fourth-quarter comeback by the Eagles — had eight.
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