Neumann Goretti pulls away late from Germantown Academy

For three quarters on Wednesday night’s non-league matchup featuring Germantown Academy and Neumann-Goretti, the Patriots gave one of the best teams in the area, if not the country, a run for their money.

Ultimately Goretti would outlast GA, outscoring the Patriots 18-2 in the fourth quarter to preserve a 48-31 victory.

“They capitalize on any mistake that you make,” GA coach Sherri Retif said. “They’re that gifted and talented. If we make a bad pass it’s a conversion or they get a rebound they score it so they got their wheels under them in the fourth quarter.”

Beating Goretti is tough task, in fact just figuring out how to beat them is a tough task. It plays disciplined, with a few exceptions, team ball and has a number of ways it’s can beat a team. Not only does it have several ways to beat a team it has more than a handful quality players that can do it.

“They’re just so fast,” Retif said. “We tried to contain them in the half court but when you come out, get behind and pull a press on them they just extended that lead.”

For three quarters, GA was right there. Staying in front of the ultra-athletic saint guards and tenaciously rebounding the ball against their skillful forwards. The problem for GA was it could never really get on a run, and credit Goretti for that, whenever it needed a bucket it got it, and was playing from behind the whole game.

“We didn’t get a lot of second shots out there and we didn’t get transition buckets,” Retif said. “Our game is usually a running game, we play base line to base line and we felt we could score in the half court on them which we did a couple times, we got some good looks but you have to be some meticulous on every possession when you’re trying to score against them in the half court.”

In the third quarter Erin Lindahl tried her best to put the Patriots on her back to try to claw their way back into the ball game. A tough and contested layup miss by Lindahl in the waning seconds of the third quarter just missed tying up the game.

“We were real pleased with her senior leadership,” Retif said of Lindahl. “She’s not our point guard and we put her at the point and said we need vocal leadership and she did. She stayed in the offense as a scorer even though she was running the point and she was the engine that fueled us.”

Moving forward the Patriots will certainly extract some lessons by playing a team that is the caliber of Goretti but most simply if it plays like it did in the third quarter they will be on the right track.

“What we need to do is play every quarter like we played the third quarter,” Retif said. “We held them to (three) buckets in the third quarter and we outscored them. We just have to spread that style of play out through four quarters and I think we can.”