St. Pius Girls Advance To Region Tourney, Clinch Playoff Spot

For the second time this season, the girls basketball team fell behind early to Woodward Academy. And again, the Lady Golden Lions came back to win by a comfortable margin. 

This time, the team’s 43-34 win on Thursday night over their region rival clinched a playoff spot for Kyle Snipes’ team as the St. Pius girls overcame 25 points from star sophomore guard Tiana Grissom to defeat Woodward in the quarterfinals of the 5-AAA tournament at Riverwood.

St. Pius (21-5, 13-0 region) is the top seed from the A sub-region coming off a first-round bye, and Woodward, the fourth seed from the B subregion, played to a 44-29 SPX road win back on January 25.

“Coming into our year, our goal was to win the sub-region,” Snipes said. “We did that and got the bye. Then our goal was to win the first-round game, then we’ll worry about seedings.”

Woodward (12-14, 7-7) jumped out to a 22-13 lead with under a minute to go in the first half after Grissom nailed a three from the corner, her first of three in the game. But St. Pius would make that up and more after Dylan Krause — who scored all seven of her points in the second quarter — made a lay-up and got fouled. Krause missed the free throw, but an offensive rebound and kick to Emma Ucinski for three closed the half on five straight St. Pius points as the Lady Golden Lions cut the lead to 22-18 right before halftime.

“The score at the half (at Woodward) was 22-18, same as tonight, and we talked to them at halftime and said we’ll just flip it on them again,” Snipes said.

St. Pius did just that, adding on to the late first-half 5-0 run by scoring the first nine points in the third quarter. Grissom, who was nearly unstoppable in the first half with 15 points against St. Pius’ 2-3 zone, faced a series of man-to-man match-ups in the second half in order to slow her down.

“We basically tried to face-guard her as much as possible in the second half to make sure she didn’t get the ball back,” Ucinski said.

Grissom had several turnovers and shot a much lower percentage from the field after the defensive change but still managed 10 points in the second half.

“Sometimes she’s just going to make shots,” Ucinski added. “She had some great drives and shots and some threes. She’s a really good player.”

St. Pius opened up a 27-22 lead after a Grissom basket stopped the 14-0 run, but led just 29-26 heading into the final quarter. 

After that, it was all Lions.

Pius opened up what was its biggest lead of the game at the time with a 34-28 advantage with 3:37 left to play and held as much as a 13-point lead after Anne Lloyd Bean sunk four straight free throws to essentially ice the win.

St. Pius enjoyed a balanced scoring effort across the board with Ucinski and Sydni Payne leading the team with eight points, and Bean, Krause and Anna O’Donnell scored seven apiece.

St. Pius meets Washington tomorrow at 4 p.m. at Riverwood, and Snipes said he hopes his team plays well enough to score more than the 31 points—one of the team’s lowest outputs of the season—it scored against the Lady Bulldogs the first time. A win against Washington would put St. Pius in Saturday’s 7 pm region championship game, also at Riverwood.