East Hampton Comes Up Short

All that is good about girls' basketball in East Hampton was on display Monday night in the Bellringers’ final home game of the season.

Former players were on hand to cheer the current Bellringers. Future players from parks and recreation showed off their skills at halftime. Shaun Russell was recognized for his 15 years as coach of the girls team. And it was Senior Night, a chance to honor and thank players who had given so much to the program.

“They worked hard,” Russell said. “We try to let them know how we feel about them, which is we have great respect for everything they’ve done and care very much about where they are going to go from here. We do the best we can to send them off, feeling good and treated right."

There was a basketball game, too. The importance of which was not lost on the players. Win and East Hampton stood a good chance of qualifying for the postseason, needing one more victory at Valley Regional. Lose and its postseason aspirations were over. A simple scenario in a not-so-simple season.

East Hampton lost to Morgan, 48-25. The game was much more competitive than the final score indicated, with Morgan (12-6) turning an eight-point fourth-quarter lead into the final margin of victory. If the season can best be described as an uphill climb, so too can this game.

East Hampton (6-13) spotted Morgan a 9-3 first-quarter lead, Sarah Thompson scoring the first eight of those points, and spent the remainder of the game trying to catch the Huskies. Just like the Bellringers couldn’t reach the magic number of eight wins to qualify for the postseason, they couldn’t catch Morgan.

Not because of a lack of effort, however. East Hampton never quit on the season or on each other. Lopsided losses were followed by solid victories. A three-game winning streak and four wins in five games in January positioned the Bellringers for a shot at the postseason. With the next five games against tournament-bound teams, it just wasn’t meant to be.

“The spirit of basketball is alive and well tonight,” Russell said. “You can’t go through life and hang everything that happens on winning and losing. We had a great Senior Night. We had a bunch of little kids here cheering for you. The kids I thought played their butts off tonight. Tonight had nothing to do with effort. It’s a night we can feel good about being a part of this program, this community and feel proud of this team like others.”

Not qualifying for the postseason is something new to Russell. In his 14 previous seasons coaching the Bellringers, his teams had qualified.

“It’s very hard to put into perspective or words at the moment. It’s unchartered territory,” he said. “If I could be really try to be honest for a moment here, it might be something we’ve taken for granted here. This year has been quite an odyssey. It’s been educational in terms of learning sometimes how difficult it can be to get that qualifying mark and you had the privilege of participating in that tournament. It’s certainly a goal of ours always. It’s certainly something the kids take seriously. No one is unaware of the situation we’re in at this point. At the same time, in the moment, watching them play tonight, it is not through lack of effort, or lack of togetherness, or for lack of working hard or for lack of caring about it. So, that’s fortifying. However, right now it’s a little difficult to put in perspective what that means in the big picture.”

Morgan took a 24-14 lead into the second half, but East Hampton held the Huskies to five third-quarter points and closed the gap on a three-pointer by Ashley Chasse to 29-21 entering the fourth.

For a few minutes, the Bellringers had an opportunity to cut into the deficit even more, but eventually Lily DeLaura took over and scored 10 points in the final quarter as Morgan pulled away.

In the end, East Hampton's season is left with a couple of what ifs. Namely, the loss at North Branford and the two-point loss at Haddam-Killingworth. Just don’t tell Russell this team failed by not making the postseason.

“I’d say they worked hard and almost got it,” he said. “The nicest thing to see a team do is to have respect for each other on the court all the time and to respect the game by playing hard. … Win with class, lose with class and play hard in between and for the most part the winning is going to take care of itself. Some nights you get beat by a better team or some nights you get beat by a team that played better. The nights that really get to you, the nights that make you sick to your stomach, are the nights you get beat when you don’t play hard. I can’t say that tonight. The kids played hard. That’s 32 minutes of the best they got.”

There is still one more game to play, a chance for the Bellringers to end their season on a winning note. They will play at Valley on Wednesday.

“I’m proud of their effort, proud of their togetherness,” Russell said. “I feel badly for them that the result wasn’t better.”

Thompson scored 20 to lead Morgan. DeLaura had 10.

East Hampton was led by Sarah Denihan and Ashley Chasse with 10 points each.

Denihan was sporting a bandage over her left eyebrow, a result of an injury she sustained in practice on Sunday. The senior needed seven stitches to close the gash and was a little black and blue around the eye, too.

Minus his five seniors – Chasse, Denihan, Rebecca Gustine, Morgan Langenfeld and Colleen Owen – Russell will look to start a new postseason streak next season.

“I consider myself to be very fortunate - to have coached here, to have the players I’ve had and the successful run we’ve had at a small public high school - to be able to say you’ve had 14 consecutive years of postseason basketball,” he said.