Council Rock North Girls Advance To District Finals

The faces said one thing, the scoreboard said something different. All coach Lou Palkovics saw were downtrodden, teary eyes when he returned to his locker room—and this is after the Indians handed a feisty Lower Merion team a 45-32 defeat in the PIAA District 1 Class AAAA semifinals at Norristown High School Wednesday night.

The No. 1 seeded Indians will advance to the District 1 championship game against Mount St. Joseph’s Friday at Villanova’s Pavilion. The game starts at 7 p.m. Lower Merion, the No. 5 seed, moves to the consolation round on Saturday to play Downingtown East.

What made the victory so bittersweet for North, which improved to 25-1 overall, is the possible loss of starting guard Lauren Gold for the state playoffs. Gold went down hard with 2:50 left in the game and was down for several minutes, clutching her right knee. The 5-foot-7 junior will undergo an MRI Thursday to measure the severity of the injury.

“I went into the locker room and everyone was sitting there with their heads down,” Palkovics said. “I know it was hard to see Lauren go down, but I told the girls she’ll be okay, she’s still alive. We’ll just need someone to step up and play well Friday night at Villanova.”

The last time Council Rock North won the district title was in 2007. And if the Indians can get the kind of performance from 6-foot-2 junior center Emily Grundman as they did in the district semifinals, they should be in good shape. Grundman finished with a game-high 16 points and grabbed 11 rebounds. She was a force every time she got the ball.

“Everything was just working for us in the first half,” Grundman said. “Our passes, our defense, everything. We lost in the district semifinals last year and it’s something we didn’t want to happen again.”

The game was pretty much decided in the first half, when the Indians went into intermission with a 28-10 lead. The Lower Merion Aces couldn’t do anything to stop Grundman, who had 11 points, and Lauren Gold who had seven—all scored in the second quarter.

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 again, 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.

Sheba 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.

Hall snapped Lower Merion’s 6:25 scoring draught 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.

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 halftime with a commanding 18-point 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. A Jones’ three-point play with less than a minute left pulled the Aces to within 44-32 and that was it.