Utica — It’s been a challenging couple of weeks for the Stoney Creek girls basketball team, so much so that facing an 18-point deficit late in the third quarter against Romeo on Wednesday didn’t seem as adverse in comparison.
Back on Feb. 23, the team’s head coach all season, Columbus Williams, was let go for detrimental conduct toward officials.
Taking over on an interim basis was athletic director Todd Negoshian, who led the North Farmington boys program to Division 1 state championship game appearances in 2016 and 2024 before leaving that post to become Stoney Creek’s athletic director in the summer.
Stoney Creek managed to regroup last week and win a share of the OAA Red title, but its season looked over after Romeo built what looked to be an insurmountable lead in a Division 1 district semifinal.
Remarkably, Stoney Creek still isn’t dead yet even after the sudden coaching change and the hole it dug against Romeo.
Stoney Creek stormed back in the final two minutes of the third quarter and in the fourth quarter, rallying for a 49-45 victory to advance to a district final on Friday against a red-hot Utica Eisenhower team at Eisenhower.
“It’s their resiliency they’ve shown in the last 10-14 days and how tough they are,” Negoshian said. “They just have no desire to give in and no desire to quit. That really showed tonight. They just kept talking about how they had to refocus and get back to playing harder.”
Romeo held a 35-17 lead with under three minutes remaining in the third quarter and a 38-25 lead going into the fourth.
Simply put, Romeo was the better team up to that point, battling Stoney Creek’s bigger frontline, winning every loose ball and making shots behind a patient offensive attack.
Then, the game completely turned around.
Stoney Creek (19-4) started trapping defensively, attacking the basket on offense and using its size to get more offensive rebounds.
Trailing 40-30 with under six minutes remaining in the fourth, Stoney Creek cut its deficit to 43-40 with 3:37 remaining, and then took a 44-43 lead with 1:12 remaining after a basket by senior Zare Nigl.
Stoney Creek clamped down on defense and got single free throws from junior Calista Ivezaj, senior Izzy Ivezaj and senior Jadelynn Freeman to take a 47-43 lead with 42 seconds left.
Romeo couldn’t get another basket until the final seconds after Stoney Creek built a 49-43 lead.
Freeman led the way, scoring a game-high 22 points for Stoney Creek, which outscored Romeo 24-7 in the fourth quarter.
“Our message was just to stay together and keep our heads up,” Freeman said. “Obviously we started off a little slow and we’ve been picking that up a little bit. Our mentality was that we want to have another day. We want to practice tomorrow and finish off strong. That was our mentality.”
Senior Sarah Jesperson and junior Abigail Slancik each scored 13 points in defeat for Romeo, which finished 16-7 and was second in the MAC White during the regular season.
“It was partly us and partly them,” Romeo head coach Roy LeBlanc said of what went wrong in the fourth quarter. “We blocked out so well for the first three quarters. But then we lost that focus and that intensity. I know they had a lot of second-chance opportunities that they didn’t have in the first three quarters. Kudos to them. They changed the game plan and started attacking the rim.”
Keith Dunlap is a freelance writer.
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Rochester Stoney Creek storms back to edge Romeo in girls district semifinal
Reporting by Keith Dunlap, Special to The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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