Upper Dublin’s defense shines in SOL American win over Wissahickon
UPPER DUBLIN >> The Upper Dublin girls basketball team kept its Suburban One League American Conference title hopes alive with a 60-28 win over Wissahickon Tuesday evening at Upper Dublin Hign School.
The Cardinals are one game behind Plymouth Whitemarsh with each team having one game remaining in the regular season.
“It’s not the last thing in our mind,” Upper Dublin coach Morgan Funsten said, “but it’s close to that last thing in our mind. We’ve come through a lot of adversity this year and it hasn’t always been that way throughout the regular season. We are just excited about playing well right now. That’s really our only focus. We know how good PW is and it’s going to be difficult for them to drop a game. It would be great if we could get a share, but we’re really just focused on ourselves.”
“At this point you can’t really do anything,” center Jackie Vargas said. “Just wait and see what happens. At the end of the day it is what it is. If we get it – great. If we don’t – that’s fine. We can’t do anything else.”
Upper Dublin’s defense played a huge role in the win over Wissahickon. Not only did it hold the Trojans to 28 points and force 16 turnovers, but it only committed six fouls.
“When we are at our best defensively we aren’t fouling,” Funsten said. “That was one of the things earlier in the year, as of a few weeks ago when we still weren’t clicking on all cylinders, our foul totals were up. I tried to look at everything compared to last year and previous years to try to figure out what’s wrong with us a few weeks ago. A couple stats stuck out. One was we weren’t shooting the ball as well as we had in the past … and we were fouling too much.
“We knew that shooting the ball would come around, but fouling was a mindset we needed to get out of and it was not good because when we are at our best defensively we are not fouling. Lately we have done a much better job at not getting in foul trouble.”
“The coaches let us know we reach too much sometimes,” Vargas said. “I think we’ve been working on it in practice and it translates to the games.”
The Cardinals (17-6, 11-3 SOL American) used an 11-0 run to turn a 4-3 deficit halfway through the first quarter into a 14-4 lead early in the second and never looked back. Anajae Smith led the run with four points and a pair of rebounds.
Upper Dublin dominated the rest of the first half, taking a 29-10 lead to intermission and it was more of the same after the break. The lead grew to 47-15 at the end of the third and 60-28 at the final whistle.
In their second-to-last regular season home games, the Upper Dublin seniors did most of the scoring, combining for 45 points. Smith tallied a game-high 14 points, Jackie Gorman added 13 and Vargas had nine.
“Seventy-five percent of our scoring came from our seniors,” Funsten said, “which is really cool. We are excited about where we are as a team and we are excited that some girls were about to come off the bench tonight and really help us, give us a spark, make some shots. We are looking forward to the week ahead.”
Anna Schools led the Trojans (8-13, 4-9 SOL American) with 11 points.
