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Staff Reporter In the biggest game in school history, the "bigs" came up big for Solon. Behind the inside dominance of 6-foot senior Kourtney Brown and 6-2 sophomore Erin Wisner, Solon outlasted Wadsworth 66-62 in the second of two Division I state semifinals at Value City Arena. Solon (23-3) will face Cincinnati Mt. Notre Dame 24-3 in the state championship game Saturday night at 8:30. "Coach said just get in the middle and go straight to the hoop," Brown said of her marching orders from Comets coach Julie Solis. "Everything was working really well." Brown made 14-of-17 shots from the field and finished with a game-high 31 points. Her 12 rebounds matched Wisner's total, as Solon owned the boards, 41-29. Wisner, who played all 32 minutes, finished with 18 points, making 7-of-12 shots, including 2-of-4 3-pointers. Brown won an incredible head-to-head battle with Wadsworth junior Cassie Schrock. Schrock finished with 21 points. "We had no answer for Cassie Schrock," Solis said. The Grizzlies (23-4) did have an answer for Wisner or Brown in junior post Jen Uhl, but not for both. Uhl played a solid game with 16 points and 10 rebounds. But Solon's two-headed inside monster was more than she could contain by herself. Solon raced out to an 18-8 lead after a quarter, with Brown scoring half her team's points. The Comets stretched their edge to as many as 14 and still led by that margin. 35-21, with 2:06 left in the first half. "I thought in the first half we could have gotten an even bigger lead," Solis said, lamenting several good scoring opportunities gone astray. Wadsworth staged a mini-rally in the final two minutes of the first half to pull within 39-30. The Grizzlies then scored the first eight points of the third quarter to make it a one-point game. They needed barely two minutes to do that. Solon responded, though, first on a jump shot by freshman Dana Banda, then a jumper by junior point guard Julie Taylor, and then a 3-pointer by Wisner. Just like that it was an eight-point lead again, with 4:04 left in the period. "If we would have gotten the lead in the third quarter, we would have had them on the ropes," Wadsworth coach Andrew Booth said. "We couldn't deliver the knock-out punch." The Grizzlies rallied again, cutting the margin to 56-54 to end the third quarter. Again, though, they couldn't get over the hump. Solon only scored five points over the first five-plus minutes of the final period, but Wadsworth was held scoreless over the span. The Grizzlies missed their first 11 shots of the final period. At no point was their frustration better illustrated then when Schrock, after a Chrissy Pavlik steal near mid-court, missed an open lay-up, got the rebound and missed again. "We couldn't get anything to drop," Booth said. Solon pushed the lead back to nine points with two minutes left before Emily Brede ended the field goal drought with a 3-pointer with 1:35 left. Wadsworth would cut it to three points at 65-62 on a Pavlik basket with 22 seconds left, but a Wisner free throw with 15 seconds left ended the Grizzlies' chances. |
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