Orihel’s superb second half lifts Archbishop Wood over West Catholic

WARMINSTER >> Get the ball to Kaitlyn Orihel.

That about summed up the contents of Archbishop Wood’s halftime talk Thursday night against West Catholic. Orihel, hit with a couple early fouls, hadn’t been much of a factor in the first half with the Burrs happy to capitalize. With the Vikings still seeking a signature win the PCL, they needed their sophomore guard to step up.

So Wood got the ball to Orihel and she gave them the best half of her career.

Orihel scored 28 of her 32 points in the second half, including all 18 of Wood’s third quarter points as the Vikings rallied for a 54-51 win over a Burrs team that came in tied for the PCL’s best record.

“It’s not just getting ball, it’s also looking to score,” Orihel said. “We realized how they were playing defense in the first half, they were over-playing everything so my cuts were definitely open. I have the teammates who can get me the ball on those cuts and once we started scoring on those cuts, we played great defense, boosted our energy and we knew it could be a win.”

Orihel, who picked up two fouls in the first quarter, spent long stretches on the bench trying to avoid further foul trouble and admitted she wasn’t able to get herself enough good shots. The sophomore, a third team all-state and first team all-PCL pick last year, had four points at the break as the Vikings trailed 22-15.

“We made it a point to make sure she was getting the ball,” Wood coach Mike McDonald said. “She’s such a tough, physical kid and she finishes so well that it’s really hard to stop her one-on-one. I thought they saw that and went zone so the whole team was patient and found different options but didn’t settle for outside shots every time.”

As the team put up shots before the third quarter, Orihel watched one of hers rim out as she vented some of her frustration. Then, her next shot swished in and she made her next three tries.

It was go time, and she was ready for it.

“Even though I wasn’t making them at first at halftime, I knew I had to step up,” Orihel said. “We were down, so I had to step up.”

A tremendously athletic team, West Catholic is also very physical and the Burrs set that type of tone in the first half. Orihel, who the coaches have nicknamed “Tough,” could barely contain a grin when the physical nature of Thursday’s game came up.

The more rough and tumble the game, the better for the sophomore. Her third quarter effort was tremendous as she read West Catholic’s overplays on defense and kept cutting to the basket, either scoring or getting thwacked and earning a trip to the foul line.

“I think when it’s a physical team like that, they don’t expect you to play physical back, so once you give that physical play back, they aren’t always expecting it,” Orihel said. “Then you get in their head. Once we matched their physicality mentally, I think we were on our way to win.”

Orihel shot 15-of-16 from the foul line in the game and in the third quarter alone, she was 4-of-5 from the floor and 9-of-10 at the stripe. McDonald also credited the rest of the players for being unselfish enough to keep feeding Orihel even if it took shots away from them.

“She’s physical, she cuts hard, she wants to come to the ball and isn’t afraid of contact, that was all her reading that defense and pinpointing what could get her open,” McDonald said. “Her dad was a football player, she was raised tough, she was tough before she came here and has been battling tough competition for two years, so it’s only made her tougher.”

McDonald felt like his team also figured things out defensively in the third quarter even though, as he noted, West Catholic was almost matching Orihel point for point. Even with all that, Wood still trailed 37-33 going into the final eight minutes of play.

The Burrs’ Ciani Montgomery staked the visitors to a 39-33 lead early in the fourth, then Wood finally got the run it had been looking for. Freshman Ryanne Allen hit two at the line, Annie Whalen found Orihel for a layup, then Allen found a cutting Orihel to tie it.

Off a rebound, Orihel flung an outlet pass nearly three-fourths of the way down the floor, finding Allen for the go-ahead bucket with 3:53 left before Whalen capped the 10-0 spurt for a 43-39 lead.

“We knew we had the momentum again,” Allen said. “We had the lead, so we wanted to keep scoring and try to put the game away.”

Allen, who scored six of her eight points in the fourth, was a catalyst on the defensive end. The 6-foot-1 freshman stepped up against Singletary, making the West Catholic senior work hard to score and coming down with two pivotal rebounds.

“We had to put more pressure on them, I had (Singletary), I’m our tallest player so I knew I had to step up and play some defense so we could keep getting good offense,” Allen said. “We had to play more aggressive and have more heart. I just tried to make her go right more.”

Allen also had two assists, two blocks and two steals while Whalen, one of the team’s four seniors honored pregame, scored nine points with a team-best eight rebounds, two assists and a couple of steals.

West Catholic tried everything to slow down Orihel, including face-guarding the sophomore in the fourth quarter. Orihel, who shot 8-of-12 from the floor in the game, also contributed five rebounds, two assists, a block and a steal in an all-around game.

“She realized once she started getting face guarded what to go into with the offense and that, impresses me the most,” McDonald said. “We run an offense where there’s a ton of reads and as sophomore, it’s tough to sometimes pick up on all those things. She realized when there was a face-guard, there was a backdoor cut that would get her open and it would up getting her fouled because she’s so hard to cover in that situation.”

Orihel went 6-of-6 from the line in the fourth and found Whalen for a layup with 24 seconds left that iced the win. The guard, who has played a lot of basketball games, rated Thursday among her best but wouldn’t go as far to call it her best overall.

As for that second half however, Orihel  did give herself some props for that.

“I’ll say it was my best half, the first half wasn’t quite there,” Orihel said.

ARCHBISHOP WOOD 8 7 18 21 – 54
WEST CATHOLIC 10 12 15 14 – 51
AW: Kaitlyn Orihel 8 15-16 32, Ryanne Allen 1 6-8 8, Annie Whalen 4 1-2 9, Lindsay Tretter 1 0-0 2, Noelle Baxter 1 0-0 3. Nonscoring: Ryleigh Parsons, Liz Fasti, Brianna Bowen. Totals: 15 22-26 54.
WC: Destiny McPhaul 2 3-5 7, Amiyah Edney-Holmes 3 0-0 8, Ciani Montgomery 5 3-4 13, Daja Hosendorf 4 0-0 8, Kyliah Singletary 1 4-4 6, Daziyhana Montgomery-Wilson 3 0-0 9. Totals: 18 10-13 51.
3-pointers: AW – Orihel, Baxter; WC – Montgomery-Wilson 3, Edney-Holmes 2.