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| Ramapo starts fast, finishes strong on way to county final | ||||||||||
“Before we even got a shot off, we were behind the eight-ball,” said Pascack Valley head coach Jeff Jasper. “Ramapo played exceptional defense on the perimeter. That mixed with us not passing or catching the ball well equaled up to a big problem.” Pascack Valley answered with a 7-2 run, capped by a Maggie Ely jumper to cut the lead to 10-7 late in the first quarter. But those were her only points of the game and Ramapo maintained a slim lead before getting a bit of luck heading into the locker room. Ramapo’s Ana Drehwing banked in a three-pointer to give Ramapo a 20-13 halftime lead. “Sarah (Halejian) gets a lot of attention because she’s a great player, but we have a lot of people that can score,” said Ramapo’s Samantha Klie. “It is tough to cover all of us and we’re all capable of hitting big shots. The key was that we got a lot of big stops defensively and we didn’t let them get on a roll.” The Indians got back to within three on an inside basket from Traci Corra. But Halejian answered on the other end by beating a double-team with a spin move and converting a short jumper just before the third-quarter buzzer to give Ramapo a five-point cushion, 25-20, heading into the final eight minutes of regulation.
Pascack Valley showed what it is capable of in the fourth quarter of big games last week in its upset over second-seeded Teaneck, but this time around the Indians could not buy a bucket, and that was because of the Ramapo’s 2-3 match-up zone that gave them problems all game long. Halejian started off the final stanza with a jumper and Erinn Hogan followed with a putback to quickly push it up to a nine-point lead. The Raiders scored the rest of their points on foul shots and did the unthinkable in not allowing a single point in the quarter to finish off the game in style. “Give Ramapo credit where credit is due, we got beat in every facet of the game,” added Jasper. “Ramapo came in with a great gameplan and executed it. We can’t feel bad about this. This wasn’t one of those coulda, shoulda, woulda kind of games. I thought we played well defensively. But when you manufacture no offense and score 20 points in a game, you deserve what you get and you can’t expect to win no matter how well you play defense.” Klie did a little bit of everything, finishing with 10 points, six rebounds, and a game-high five steals for Ramapo (23-2). Halejian led all players with 11 points to go with four rebounds, four assists, and two steals.
Terry Ely pulled down a game-high seven rebounds and her sister Maggie had six boards for Pascack Valley (20-5). No PV player scored more than four points as the Indians shot just 24.3-percent from the floor (9 of 37) and attempted just one free-throw in the entire game compared to 20 free-throw attempts for Ramapo. Ramapo advances to next week’s Bergen County final where it will face fourth-seeded St. Mary’s, a 42-39 upset winner over top-seeded IHA. Both teams are looking for their first-ever county titles. It will be a matter of who can control the pace of the game. Either way, the Raiders are excited for the challenge. “You work all year to get to this point and this is where we want to be,” said Ramapo head coach Sandy Gordon, who led Ramapo to the title game as a player back in 1984. “We talked before we even went out today that we would have to create our offense off of our defense. Not often you are going to hold a Jeff Jasper-coached team to 20 points, so I’m very pleased with our effort. We started off hot and finished as strong as we have all season. We have nothing to lose next week. We hope to come in and play as well as we did today.” FOR MORE PHOTOS OF THIS EVENT OR TO BUY A COLLECTOR'S PRINT OF THIS GAME STORY, PLEASE VISIT 4FeetGrafix.com. ![]() |
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