South Girls Basketball Closes Season with 31-26 Loss to Suffern

The Vikings ended their season with a 31-26 first round playoff loss to Suffern Thursday afternoon.

A banged-up South team showed up in Suffern on Thursday for their first game of the post-season.  South dug deep, however, and, despite missing two of their starters going into it, and losing one more as the game progressed, South left it all on the floor in a hard-fought, defensive battle with Suffern that came down to the final seconds.

“We had three starters out," said the Vikings head coach Jennifer Chiera.  "We started out with two down, one of our starters rolled her ankle, a shooter for us, another starter is out with a virus, she’s been out for three days, and then the third starter is out with a head injury, so that really hurt us a lot.  We only have ten deep and that hurts.”

Despite this, the team was optimistic and showed up at Suffern looking to play hard and push their season as far is it could go.

“It’s sectionals, and anything can happen in sectionals,” said Chiera.  “It’s a whole different season, so we just kind of went in with the mentality of it is what it is and it can be done.  The last couple games we had against them, the first game here was a two point game and the other I think was a nine point game.”

“I had no doubt that my teammates would step in and play anywhere, because in practice we go hard,” said freshman Viking Laura Castaldo, who was a powerhouse defensively and in the paint on offense.  “When we go out there, I have confidence in all our players to keep going hard and playing.”

Missing three players and facing a team with the depth of the Mounties, the Vikings focused on their half-court game.

“We couldn’t really do a lot of pressing, because they have a lot of depth,” said Chiera of their strategy going into the game.  “But it was just put pressure on the board and try to double Baccas and whatever happens, happens.”

Though they kept it close throughout the game, South scored in spurts and so they put themselves in a tough position at the end.  Trailing by ten, they willed themselves back into it.  They fell a three short, however, of sending it into overtime.

“I think just getting a good start was our issue, getting comfortable with those five on the floor,” said Chiera.  “We weren’t able to do that.  We didn’t have a five that got comfortable for a long enough period of time.”

On Suffern’s side of it, their head coach Bill Nolan credited both team’s stellar defensive efforts for making it such a close game.

“It was a huge win,” said Nolan.  “I think we had a tremendous defensive effort through four quarters.  If you look at the scoreboard, both teams played great defensively, which is tough offensively, but I think Kaitlyn Wood did a great job offensively, keeping us in it in the first half, she had sixteen of our points.  She hit some long range shots early which kept us in and attacked the basket, which gave us a chance.  We weren’t too forward offensively, but defensively, I can’t go wrong with the effort.  I thought it was a battle from the opening to the end.  We could’ve made it a little easier on ourselves at times, but my heart goes out to them.  They played hard.  We played hard for four quarters and so did Clarkstown South.”

Though very pleased with getting the win, Nolan could have been happier with his team’s offensive performance.

“It got interesting at the end,” said Nolan.  “What I thought is, every single quarter, we could have gotten a double-digit lead.  We missed a lot of easy shots, uncontested shots around the basket.  We got good opportunities, we just couldn’t hit them.  So that was basically the storyline.  We got good looks, we didn’t hit our good looks, but again, a victory’s a victory any way you look at it in the playoffs.”

The largely defensive game started off with a low-scoring first and second quarter, which put Suffern ahead 17-15 going into the third.  Everyone contributed for South’s 11 points.  Kaitlyn Wood was the driving force behind Suffern offensively with 13 points at the half.

With just under two minutes gone in the third, South took another major blow when senior starter Katie Hewitt went down hard.  She was able to walk off the court, but would sit for the rest of the game with a head injury.  The low-scoring quarter was dominated by both team’s defenses to leave Suffern leading 19-15 going into the fourth.

Suffern opened the fourth with a dominant performance to take a ten point lead, their largest of the night, with just under two minutes to play.  With the season on the line, the Vikings showed how much they wanted the win as they fought their way back into the game.

“We just didn’t want to give up, we just wanted to keep working hard and we didn’t make a section game in a long time and we just wanted to keep pushing and we wanted to go far,” said Castaldo.  “We ended up short, but, like I said, we worked really hard out there.”

The 10-5 run culminated in Siobhan Maguire getting to the free throw line where she made her first but missed her second to make it a two possession game.  South rebounded and Allison Haugh was fouled and sent to the line shooting three.  With her team down by six, she made all three to make it a one possession game.  South got the ball back and Haugh took the three.  It would not go, however, and Wood got the rebound.  She was promptly fouled and made both to put Suffern up 31-26 and the game out of reach for South.

Leading Suffern to victory was Wood with 16 points.  Haugh and Maguire both led South with 7.  Suffern moves on with an 11-7 record to play Ossining.  South closes an excellent season 8-11.

“I’m really proud of our season,” said Chiera.  “We came from two wins last year to quadrupling our wins to eight this year.  In the games we were in, previous seasons were 20 or 30 point games, all of our games this year have been two point games, seven point games, most of our games were under 10 or at 10, with the exceptions of the Albertus’s and Pearl Rivers, TZ, but, for the most part, these scores are a huge reflection of previous years.”

“I’m pleased with our record and how we played and how it was a big improvement from last year,” agreed Castaldo.

For Suffern, the season continues and they continue to push as hard as they can to try and take it all the way.  No matter what happens next in the playoffs, they have already had a great season.

“A few words about our season as a whole was I thought we did a tremendous job,” said Nolan.  “I thought we battled from the first game.  No one really gave us a shot to win a league title, and we’re co-league champs.  We split the league with Clarkstown North.  Nobody talked about us from the beginning to the end, they talked about South and North playing off in the middle of the season for a possible league title and we weren’t even mentioned, so to lose our first league game and then run off seven wins in a row, that was pretty big on our part.  I credit the girls for that.”