Lady Aces Fall a Game Short of District Finals

Sheba Hall wasn’t about to let go. Not like this. Not this easily either. The senior point guard usually plays with a placid veneer—an expressionless style void of emotion. Not Wednesday night. There was added spark to her game in the PIAA District 1 Class AAAA semifinals against No. 1 seed Council Rock North, considered the best team in the area.

At times, Hall was the best player on a court filled with special players, but her 12 points and passionate play wasn’t enough to propel the Aces past a very strong Council Rock North team, as Lower Merion fell 45-32 to the Indians at Norristown High School.

Lower Merion will play Downingtown East in the consolation round for third place in the district on Saturday at a site and time to be determined. The No. 5 seeded Aces dropped to 22-4, while North improved to 25-1 and will play Mount St. Joseph’s on Friday at 7 p.m. at the Villanova Pavilion for the District 1 championship.

“I think nerves got the best of us,” said Hall, who suffers from anterior and posterior compartmental syndrome, enduring extreme pain in her lower legs. “We needed to go out and play relaxed and we didn’t in the first half. It was nerves. We took ourselves out of the game.”

The game was pretty much decided in the first half, when the Indians went into intermission with a 28-10 lead. Lower Merion couldn’t do anything to stop 6-foot-2 junior center Emily Grundman, who had 11 points in the first half and finished with a game-high 16 along with 10 rebounds.

Defense was the key.

North stymied Lower Merion’s attack by reacting well to the ball and forcing the Aces into taking bad shots. The Indians prevented Lower Merion’s leading scorer, Lila Jones, from scoring a point the first half.

North isn’t a team to get down early against, and Lower Merion didn’t help itself by making just one of its first nine shots. It also didn’t help that the Aces turned the ball over 11 times in the first half, a combination of sloppy passing and how well the Indians denied and anticipated.

Hall gave Lower Merion its first and only lead of the game on a driving layup in the Aces’ initial possession of the game—and that was it. The Indians scored the next 11 points, using stellar defense to create transition baskets and feeding Grundman down low.

It was Manhattan-bound Hall that snapped Lower Merion’s 6-minute, 25-second scoring drought when she steered her way through a rare clear lane. By that time, North had built an 11-4 lead. A Grundman basket put North up 23-6 with 2:49 left in the half, but the Aces made a brief rally, scoring consecutive baskets from Carmen Torres, the Aces’ 6-foot-2 sophomore center who scored 17 against Cheltenham to enable the Aces to reach the semifinals.

But just when Lower Merion seemed as if it was ready to chip away, the Indians quickly quelled any possibility of that happening when North scored the last five points of the half to go into locker room with a commanding 28-10 lead.

Lower Merion made a valiant effort in the third quarter to climb back, but the Indians’ lead was too insurmountable to get any closer than 40-28, after a Jones’ layup, and again 44-32 on a Jones’ three-point play with less than a minute left in the game.

“I’m angry, because I know we could have played better, I could have played better,” said Jones, who finished with eight points. “The real frustrating thing is that we didn’t play hard as a team, not as hard as we should have. We didn’t play as hard as Sheba played, and the girl was in pain the whole game. I think that’s what was so frustrating about this. It wasn’t anything Council Rock did, or the coaches. It was us.”