On February 22, the girls’ basketball team won their sixth consecutive County Championship in a 43-29 victory over Pierson/Bridgehampton. The East Hampton Star featured an article on the game.
Whalers Mauled by Bears in ‘C’ Game
Crashing the boards and putting up second shots, the Stony Brook Bears, who had lost once to Pierson/Bridgehampton in the regular League VIII season, won the pivotal third meeting by a score of 43-29 at St. Joseph’s College on Feb. 22, and thus went home with their sixth straight county Class C championship.
Dennis Case, Pierson’s coach, paid obeisance to Stony Brook’s versatile 5-foot-11-inch senior guard-forward, Brannon Burke, afterward. “She was great — her foul shots alone probably made the difference,” he said.
They almost did: Burke, who finished with a game-high 26 points, was nigh perfect at the foul line, making 11 of 12 tries. She also came down with 10 rebounds. Danielle Pappas led the winners in that category with 14; Keara Vancol had 8, and the 6-foot-3-inch Natalie Istrati, a senior center who came off the bench in the second half, had 5.
Stony Brook’s 41 rebounds (18 of them offensive) were decisive, though Amy Helm, the Bears’ coach, put in a good word for her defense when a spectator, in attempting a rhymed summation, said, “You were tall and their shots didn’t fall.”
Using just about every defensive alignment in the book, except a 2-3 and a box-and-one, the Bears, who used their height to advantage, barely gave the Whalers any breathing room.
“We shot poorly,” Case said, adding that “you’ve got to give them credit — they played great defense… You have to stop Burke to beat them. We did over there [on Jan. 11, a game that Pierson won 35-33], but we didn’t today. She’s a great player.”
Still, the energetic Whalers were never out of it until the final two minutes when they were forced to foul Burke, who proceeded to run an eight-point margin up to 12. With 1:57 left on the clock and with the Whalers down by eight, Amanda Busiello, a Pierson guard, had a good look from the right corner, but her 3-point attempt sailed over the hoop into the hands of a Stony Brook rebounder. Slashing to the basket at the other end, Burke was fouled and made both shots for a 37-27 lead. She then picked Emily Hinz’s pocket and drove for the hoop again, drawing another foul, which prompted Case to call a timeout.
When play resumed, Burke, the county’s 10th leading scorer with 16.8 points per game and League VIII’s unanimous MVP, made both free throws. Hinz put back a Busiello miss at the other end, and when, following a Stony Brook timeout, the ball was inbounded, it went to Burke, whom Sarah Barrett, Pierson’s senior point guard, fouled immediately. Again Burke made two free throws, and that was it as far as the scoring went, save for two foul shots made by one of her teammates, Jessica Winston, in the final seconds.
Pierson shot 20 percent from the field in the first half, which ended with Stony Brook ahead 19-11. The Whalers, who had their chances in the second, shot a rather dismal 24 percent for the game.
A 3-pointer by Sam James, Burke’s counterpart, pulled Pierson to within 21-14 early in the third, and Kaci Koehne’s 3-point play with 3:48 left in the game chopped the Bears’ margin to six, but, with 2:58 to go, Burke drained a 3-pointer, her third of the fray, upping Stony Brook’s lead to nine again. After Barrett had drawn a foul and made the front end of a one-and-one, Busiello tied Burke up in the right corner, and Burke, on her back, turned the ball over.
Had Busiello made her aforementioned 3-point attempt moments later and had Barrett, who came up with 6 steals that night, hawked one or two more, things might have ended differently.
But it was not to be.
“It happens,” said Case. “What are you going to do?”
stonybrookbears.org 