Gwynedd Mercy Academy limits Mount Saint Joseph Academy in AACA semifinals
WYNDMOOR >> It would have been easy to look at Gwynedd Mercy Academy’s last meeting with Mount Saint Joseph Academy and think nothing went right for the Monarchs.
That’s not how Gwynedd Mercy’s coaches saw it. Sure, the offense had struggled mightily but coach Tom Lonergan always puts defense first and saw that his young team had held its own on that end against a senior-laden Magic club and he didn’t see their inevitable rematch in Saturday’s AACA semifinals as any reason to make any crazy changes.
The No. 2 seeded Monarchs used their defense, and a much more productive day offensively, to down the No. 3 seeded Magic 35-25 to advance to the AACA title game on Tuesday.
“Defense travels,” Lonergan said. “There’s no reason for us not to bring it all the time. Even last game we played them, they won by a 20-point score but they were still in the 30s defensively. We looked at what we did defensively, saw what we could do to tweak it to make it that much better and that’s what we did.”
Gwynedd Mercy Academy led wire-to-wire and had surpassed their 15-point total from the last game by halftime of Saturday’s semifinal. Defensively, the Monarchs mixed some man defense with some zone with some press as usual and most importantly, they kept Mount Saint Joseph Academy from getting it’s three-point shooting going. GMA limited the Magic to single-digit scoring in each of the first three quarters.
The Magic hit just 1-of-18 from outside the arc and didn’t have much success elsewhere, shooting 9-of-37 collectively and getting just seven free throw attempts. Mount senior Lauren Hoffman, who paced her team with eight points, also pointed to defense as a reason for Saturday’s struggles but more from her own team’s perspective.
“We didn’t play defense as well as we should have, which hurt us a lot,” Hoffman said. “I think if we’d played defense better, we could have gotten more stops and went on a run for a little bit. I think our defense is really what killed us.”
Last time out, the Monarchs’ underclassmen struggled to score. That wasn’t the case on Saturday with sophomore Cara Lapp and freshmen Emilia Coleman and Bailey Balkir combining for all eight GMA points in the first quarter, Balkir leading the team with 11 for the game and Coleman putting in seven points, nine rebounds and two blocks.
It was Coleman on the receiving end of a kick-out pass by junior Dylan Burke and knocking down a three that put Gwynedd Mercy in front 18-8 with 1:58 remaining in the first half. With the team’s defense, anchored by Burke in the middle, doing its job, that lead was enough for the Monarchs to continually keep the Mount at bay.
“We brought the energy right from the start, we knew what we had to do and got it done right away,” Coleman, who followed older sisters Bianca and Sofia to the program, said. “We knew we couldn’t give them a second chance. We had to control the glass, settle it down and use our strengths. We wanted to control the game.”
Both teams will also be in the upcoming District 1 5A playoffs, albeit on other sides of the bracket so it would take some maneuvering for them to meet up again. Lonergan stopped Hoffman in the hallway at La Salle, telling the senior guard his team’s defensive focus on her was well-warranted and wishing her and the Magic luck in their playoff opener.
The Mount’s put together some nice wins this season and Hoffman believes that her team is capable of going on a run in the playoffs. It’s just a matter of capturing the energy they had off the opening tip in their better performances consistently going forward.
“We realize that if we lose Friday, our season’s over,” Hoffman, one of four senior starters, said. “We’re going to really be honing down on that to make sure our season doesn’t end and hopefully we can get into states and keep our season going another three weeks. We have some really impressive wins, I think it’s just we’ve also had games where if we had a slow start, it was hard for us to dig back into the game.”
Saturday’s second half was pretty chaotic and a bit sloppy at times, the teams combining for more turnovers than points in the third quarter and a Magic press defense giving the Monarchs some issues early in the fourth. However, every time Mount scored or made a play, it seemed like GMA came right with one of its own to consistently keep the lead hovering near or above double-digits.
It also helped that the Monarchs were getting plenty of rebounds. Coleman, who Lonergan said has consistently been one of the team’s strongest rebounders, had three important defensive boards in the fourth while Burke pulled off the feat of grabbing not one, but two, offensive rebounds off missed GMA foul shots.
Burke, who had her only points off a layup assisted by Hannah Griffin in the fourth for a 28-17 lead, wanted to make sure her team took away anything that had helped Mount Saint Joseph in their prior meeting a few weeks back.
“We knew they liked to run on us and we had that issue the last time we played them, so being able to control the glass dictated the pace of the game I thought,” Burke said. “We made it our goal to out-rebound them, because that’s heart, that’s all that is.”
Gwynedd Mercy will try to defend its AACA title against top-seeded Villa Maria Academy after the Hurricanes downed No. 4 Nazareth Academy in the other semifinal. VMA handed the Monarchs two losses during the season, the second on a buzzer-beater, so Gwynedd Mercy Academy was looking forward to the challenge of trying to get their first win over a quality opponent to retain their title.
They set a pretty good format on Saturday which, as always, started with defense.
“We struggled because they were really up on us so we had to manage pressure not as individuals, but as a team today,” Burke said. “I thought our ball movement was great, we set solid screens and we played and ran our offense as a unit and our defense as a unit. There was a lot of talking out there and it contributed to a team win.”
Gwynedd Mercy Academy 35, Mount St. Joe’s 25
GWYNEDD MERCY ACADEMY 8 10 4 13 – 35
MOUNT SAINT JOSEPH ACADEMY 3 7 3 12 – 25
GMA: Cara Lapp 2 1-2 5, Bailey Balkir 3 5-7 11, Emilia Coleman 3 0-2 7, Hannah Griffin 2 3-6 8, Dylan Burke 1 0-0 2, Megan McDonnell 0 2-2 2. Totals: 11 11-19 35
MSJA: Kiersten Pumilia 0 1-2 1, Lauren Hoffman 4 1-1 9, Chloe McGrorty 2 0-0 5, Georgia Pickett 3 2-2 8, Carlie Shouldis 0 2-2 2. Totals: 9 6-7 25
3-pointers: GMA – Coleman, Griffin; MSJA – McGrorty
