SMITHSBURG – The Williamsport girls basketball team may have found a fruit basket outside their locker room door on Tuesday.
The card would read: From Smithsburg. It wouldn’t have been consolation for Monday’s 65-49 loss the Wildcats suffered at the hands of the Leopards, though.
Instead, this gift would be in gratitude.
“I told (the Leopards) we should go over and thank them because they did us a favor, for sure,” said Smithsburg coach Todd Bono. “(Williamsport) made this a halfcourt game and pressured us. We were making turnovers that they caused with their pressure. Yet, you guys bounced back.
“This was a great game for us to play in this time of the year.”
Williamsport put still-undefeated Smithsburg to a stress test as the Wildcats used their trademark halfcourt defense to make the Leopards sweat. It was a game where Smithsburg uncharacteristically committed too many turnovers, was charged with too many fouls and didn’t shoot that well.
But the Leopards found a way to notch their 18th win, even if was by dominating the first quarter before the Wildcats got their defensive wits about them.
Smithsburg used its quickness and press to play at full throttle to build a 22-7 lead by the end of the first quarter. But Williamsport controlled the flow of the game for most of the last 24 minutes, to play the Leopards even the rest of the way, but the early deficit was too much.
“Our guards got a little shaky in the first quarter,” Williamsport coach Kevin Murphy said. ‘We just got a little nervous with the ball, but (the Leopards) do that to you because they’re so long, they’re so quick and so athletic.
“Once we got set up on our defense in the halfcourt, we did a really good job against them. We limited their open looks.”
Smithsburg outscored Williamsport 17-2 in the final 6:20 of the first quarter to gain the 15-point edge after one quarter. Skyla Mastronardi led the charge with eight of her game-high 21 points with a breakaway layup and two 3-pointers, one coming in a straightaway bank shot.
“We just had some live-ball turnovers and gave them some easy leak-out hoops,” Murphy said. “You can’t give them easy buckets. And then Skyla banks in a three. They hit some shots and some deep threes. You have to give them credit.”
From there, the Wildcats could only get within eight points of the lead. Each team scored 16 points in the second quarter for a 38-23 Smithsburg lead at the intermission, but the Leopards only outscored the Wildcats 25-22 in the second half.
The Leopards were forced to face adversity as the things that usually worked were less effective.
“Unfortunately, it was good and bad for us,” Bono said. “We pressured them into turnovers, and we got layups in transition. But, you know, that kind of basketball doesn’t work. Our halfcourt offense wasn’t good … it wasn’t efficient. We weren’t finishing.
“Their halfcourt defense was great. Come playoff basketball, you have to be better and be able to execute in the half court. We dribbled it off a foot … threw it in the stands. We made some mistakes we don’t normally make. I didn’t think it was our best game by any stretch.”
The Leopards wobbled, but didn’t fall.
Smithsburg managed spurts to keep Williamsport at bay, squashing any comeback thoughts for the Wildcats.
The Leopards move to 23-point leads twice in the third quarter. The first was at 47-24 after a Claire Bono 3-pointer with 2:37 left in the quarter. The second was 53-30 with :13 remaining on a Mastronardi trey.
Jayda Tyler’s three-point play with 5:00 remaining gave Smithsburg at 65-50 lead. The Wildcats, who were playing without leading scorer Arisa Hardy for medical reasons, outscored the Leopards 14-5 to end the game.
Rileigh Cole led Williamsport with 11 points while Abby Curry added 10.
Claire Bono backed Mastronardi’s outing with 15 points, while Jenna Todd added 11 and Tyler finished with 10. Mastronardi had five steals and six assists for the Leopards.
For Williamsport, the game ended up being a step in the right direction despite falling to 12-3.
We’re getting better. We were 12-2 coming into this game and we played without our leading scorer tonight,” Murphy said. “We had a lot more kids step up and compete really hard and battled them. Our kids kept fighting, which was great.”
And as it turned out, Smithsburg was better after the battle, thankfully.
“Our team is tough. One thing we aren’t going to do is back down,” Bono said. “They’re gritty and they love to compete. They didn’t stop competing and they didn’t stop sharing the ball.
“We kept doing a lot of things. We played with a lot of heart and a lot of effort. We just couldn’t make any shots.”
