Garfield girls basketball earns fourth straight district title game berth
The Class of 2022 that played an integral part in three straight runs to the district championship game (and beyond) is gone.
The streak remains.
On Wednesday, a new mixture of Garfield players, some that played in those district title games, some that didn't, gathered together and made it four straight district title game appearances with a 59-33 win over Kirtland.
"Four straight district finals, it's impressive at any level," G-Men coach Aaron Gilbert said. "Just the genuine joy in the locker room afterward, it was palpable. Like you could feel everybody enjoying it."
Gilbert noted that before the season began, he urged his 2022-2023 Garfield team to make its own history. The G-Men have surely done that, with Wednesday's Division III district semifinal win over the Chagrin Valley Conference Valley Division co-champion Hornets marking their 22nd win.
"Four in a row has never been done in school history," Gilbert said. "When this group came together at the beginning, we looked up at past successes and said, 'Okay, that's what they did. You got a chance to write your chapter."'
There was no writer's block Wednesday as Garfield worked on its latest chapter. Indeed, the G-Men were golden from the start, taking a 17-6 lead after a quarter, with four different players scoring in the first eight minutes.
Garfield senior Laura McCoy drained two of her three 3-pointers in the opening quarter, and freshman Mandy Cardinal had four of her team-leading 16 points in those opening eight minutes.
"I felt like they played 10 different defenses," Gilbert said. "[Kirtland coach Matt Ridgeway] was constantly changing defenses. Different zone looks, different man looks, different run-and-jump looks, full court, half court, three-quarter court and our girls did a great job of holding their composure, and again, working on what we had practiced and going to spots that we had practiced."
It wasn't just the G-Men's "big three" of Cardinal (16 points), McCoy (11) and senior Madeline Shirkey (11) that delivered results.
Nope, Zoey May came off the bench and ripped a 3-pointer within seconds, then slipped behind the defense on a press break for a layup.
Gilbert compared Wednesday's balanced attack to the Crestwood-Garfield boys basketball game he attended the previous night. He noted that teams plan for each other's stars, in that case Dekota Johnson for the Red Devils and Preston Gedeon for the G-Men, and even their secondary and tertiary scorers, but big games so often come down to whether anyone else can step up? On Wednesday, the answer was an emphatic yes.
In addition to May's five-point second stanza, Karleigh Clelland tallied eight points and Kali Tasker scored as well to join the usual suspects.
"You know what you're going to get out of the big three," Gilbert said. "Then it's like, OK, Nora [Trent] had a couple big buckets where they were starting to make a little push and then we got the ball into her in the post and she was able to finish. We got a lot of mileage out of a lot of players tonight, and more than usual, I guess you could say."
Defensively, meanwhile, the G-Men were no less impressive, including holding Emily Ridgeway to six points.
"There were a couple things that they did that kind of concerned me watching on film," Gilbert said. "Talking through it at practice is one thing, but when you have game speed, that's something different, and I think we did a really nice job of adjusting to the game speed and following our rules defensively and doing what we're supposed to do."
Garfield will have to be equally sharp defensively when it takes on Liberty in Saturday's district title game showdown of Mahoning Valley Athletic Conference Gray Tier rivals. The G-Men won their two regular-season meetings, but the Leopards returned another potent player since they last met in Cianna Smith. Tack Smith, whether she's 100 percent healthy yet or not, to Aaliyah Foster and Demi Watson, and it's clear Garfield is facing its greatest challenge yet of this postseason.
"She's a problem," Gilbert said of Smith. "She sees the floor so well and she's a good outside shooter. She's not 100 percent, but even a 75-percent player, 80-percent player [of] her caliber is very difficult to defend and Demi has been, just her and Foster have both been models of consistency in the tournament."
This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: Garfield basketball earns fourth straight district title game berth
