Resilient effort carries Central-Southeastern to second-half comeback, sectional championship

WAVERLY, Ill. — One of the first things Central-Southeastern girls basketball coach Matt Long reminded his players at halftime Thursday night is they trailed by only six points.

“He was right,” CSE senior forward Lauren Miller said. “We were only down six. For as bad as things had been, that had to mean something.”

It meant there was a reason to keep the faith.

“Our kids were resilient,” Long said. “You could tell when I walked down to the locker room they were talking to each other, saying things like, ‘Here’s what we’ve got to do here, there, da, da, da.’ So it wasn’t like they had their heads down. 

“If they would have had their heads down, we never would have made a run at them.”

It turned out to be a run they won’t forget.

The 20-14 halftime lead Pleasant Plains enjoyed in the Class 2A Waverly Sectional championship ballooned to 26-14 when the Cardinals’ Grace Sabatka buried back-to-back 3-pointers in the first two minutes of the third quarter. Then came CSE’s three-point barrage as five treys over a seven-minute span erased the deficit entirely.

Still, it took another burst — this one a 12-2 spurt to start overtime — for the Panthers to eventually pull away and earn a 51-44 victory, their second straight sectional title and a rematch with Nashville in Monday’s Class 2A Vandalia Super-Sectional.

“I knew we had that grit inside of us to come back,” CSE senior guard Karly Peters said. “Everyone knew it.”

The missed shots masked that.

Not only did CSE (30-3) struggle offensively in the first half, but it missed its first six field-goal attempts of the third quarter. Miller, who scored 20 points, ended the drought with a steal and a layup with 4:30 remaining in the quarter, but the shot that changed the momentum was Lexi Niekamp’s 3-pointer that made it a nine-point deficit.

The freshman guard hit two more treys in succession, the first to open the fourth quarter and pull CSE within 28-26 and the next from the right corner to give the Panthers their first lead at 29-28 with 5:40 remaining.

Niekamp finished with 18 points.

“It got our crowd back into the game really hot and heavy,” Long said. “Our kids feed off that. They feed off that energy from our crowd. Our crowd probably doesn’t know how important that is, but it’s huge.”

The Panthers are well aware of it.

“The crowd helps a lot,” said Peters, who finished with 12 points. “You saw a lot of the community was here. We appreciate that very much, and it really gets us going.”

Peters’ 3-pointer from the left wing gave CSE a four-point lead with less than four minutes to play, but Pleasant Plains wouldn’t go away. Junior forward Anna Weber scored twice and Bailey Leach’s drive for a bucket trimmed the deficit to 35-34 with 18 seconds left.

Niekamp calmly made a pair of free throws before Leach buried a 3-pointer with three seconds remaining to force overtime. But that didn’t seem to rattle the Panthers.

“Stay composed,” Peters said. “We said we had four minutes left and it could be our last four minutes of high school basketball. We had to give it our all and go out there and get it done.”

Weber scored at the rim on Pleasant Plains’ first possession of the extra period before Niekamp nailed a 3-pointer from the right corner with 3:10 to play. Peters followed with a 3-pointer from the left corner with 2:30 to go for a 43-39 lead.

After Weber made 1 of 2 free throws, Miller scored on back-to-back possessions and Peters followed with a layin off a drive down the right side of the lane to make it a nine-point advantage. That was more than enough with less than 90 seconds to play.

“Our energy really contributed to us coming back from everything,” Niekamp said. “We all knew what we had to do. It was going to be to push harder than we did in the first half.”

Not only did the Panthers push harder, their resiliency was stronger.

“I told them the other night it might have been the greatest defensive performance i’ve seen against Staunton (in the sectional semifinals),” Long said. “Tonight might have been the most resilient team I’ve ever seen. They just refused to lose. They weren’t going to walk out of here without that plaque.”

Or another shot at a final four berth. CSE will face Nashville at 6 p.m. Monday in a rematch of last year’s super-sectional, which the Hornettes won 41-32.

“It means we are one step closer to our goal,” Niekamp said.