Countdown to tipoff: Raiders finding competitive edge to carry them through Class 3A postseason

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QUINCY — The smallest spark can light a fire inside Sage Stratton.

“It’s easy to make me mad and make me not really like you,” Stratton said. “I try to find something not to like and that motivates me.”

It’s not necessarily a grudge that Stratton will hold forever. It’s just fuel for the Quincy Notre Dame senior guard while she’s on the basketball court.

“Someone could honestly look at me wrong and I’ll hold that in my heart,” said Stratton, a third-team Class 3A all-state selection last season. “I just find something to motivate me so I’m ready to go at game time, and I just take it out on the team, respectfully.”

Just like Michael Jordan, Stratton takes it personally.

“She’s certainly picked up on some of my talks,” Raiders coach Eric Orne said. “That’s good that she picked up on that that’s how Michael used that. Going into her senior year with all the success, she needs to find something as a captain to push this team. Early on, if she sees that we’re going casual, she’ll get on them and be a good leader. You’ve got to have that edge.”

Stratton brings that edge to a QND team that returns every player from a 2023-24 squad that went 28-5 after moving up to Class 3A following two straight final four appearances and a 2022 state title at 2A.

“It’s nice having everybody back, but we’ve instituted some different defenses this year like we feel like we have to do in 3A,” Orne said. “We’re still a work in progress, but we’re installing some new drills and new things that we can do better to make us stronger in the postseason.

“The intensity is still there, we’re just doing some different schemes defensively and offensively. We want to get up and down the court. We’re still doing a lot of our full-court pressure, but we’re just doing different schemes to show teams some different looks than we have in the past.”

The Raiders’ season ended with a 44-43 loss to Chatham Glenwood in the sectional championship game, another source of motivation for Stratton and her teammates.

“It hurt because we wanted to go really bad, just prove everybody wrong,” Stratton said. “It has not left our minds. It’s been our main motivation. We think about that game constantly.”

The same goes for junior point guard Ari Buehler, who missed the second of two free throws in the closing seconds that could have sent that game to overtime.

“We learned a lot from that game,” Buehler said. “It made us realize we have to work for it. We have to work all four quarters of the game. We can’t rely on just a few people to score. We all have to score. That’s something we’ve gotten a ton better at.”

Orne knows Buehler will not shy away if faced with a similar situation this year.

“That might be her Michael Jordan moment where she uses something all year long,” Orne said. “She wants the ball back in that situation, to be that person on the free throw line.”

The Raiders have plenty of pieces surrounding Stratton and Buehler, including junior forward Tristan Pieper, who is fresh off a run to the Class 2A super-sectional with the QND volleyball team.

“She’s one of the most athletic females we have at QND,” Orne said of Pieper. “As soon as she gains that confidence and understands the game a little better, her window of opportunity to really help us win is going to be really wide.”

Pieper averaged 10.5 points and 6.1 rebounds per game as a sophomore last season. She said the Raiders’ up-tempo style, especially with talented guards like Stratton and Buehler, gives the Raiders a distinct advantage.

“I think playing up-and-down, getting out in transition, we can get easy layups,” Pieper said. “We’re not always going to get them, but the more we can get layups and make the other team tired, the more momentum it brings for us.”

Buehler, who put up eight points, 3.2 rebounds and 2.8 assists per game as a sophomore, likewise pointed to the momentum that pace can generate as a key component to the Raiders’ game.

“It helps us in terms of we wear teams out faster,” Buehler said. “If I push it up the court and I make a good pass and we make another good pass and score, we have a ton of energy going into the next play defensively. We just keep feeding off of each other.”

Expected contributions from Abbie Reed and Lauren Hummel , junior Jenna Durst and sophomores Sierra Thomas and Marie Eversman give the Raiders a level of depth and create an intensity in practice that prompted Orne to liken this year’s team to the 2020-21 squad.

“We had a great senior class that year, and I really thought that’s where we turned the corner,” Orne said. “We lost in the supersectional that year, but our practices were so intense. The girls bought into that intensity and we had a successful season.” 

As long as the Raiders keep that edge, Orne likes the 2024-25 team’s chances to make a deep postseason run.

“We had some emotional heartbreak at the end of (last) year,” Orne said. “I want to see where our toughness is and if that level has been risen.”