Palatine teams up and gets defensive

When 5 points is the most you give up in any quarter, you are playing some good defense.

That was the case for Palatine’s girls basketball team, which held Lake Forest to a season-low 15 points on the final day of action of the Blue Devil Classic at Warren High School on Thursday.

The Pirates also came up with one of their most balanced offensive efforts of the season — six players scored between 4 and 8 points — to register a 40-15 triumph in Gurnee.

It gave Palatine a 3-2 record in the tournament, 10-4 overall and momentum going into the new year.

“We were kind of getting our confidence knocked down early in this tournament (with losses to Warren and Niles North),” said Pirates senior forward Katelyn Mayer, who pulled down a game-high 13 rebounds with 5 steals and 3 assists.

“So this was good for us to come back strong and closed out the tourney with some confidence going into the rest of our conference season.”

The Pirates showed their balance from the outset as four different girls scored for an 8-2 lead.

Junior McKenzie Wiedemann’s second bucket — a nifty pull-up bank shot off a fastbreak — gave Palatine a 10-2 lead less than four minutes not the period.

Wiedemann finished as the Pirates’ top scorer with 8 points while Nia Pappas (4 steals), Julie Johlie and Mayer each chipped in 5 against Lake Forest (3-14, 1-4 in tourney).

“I thought we did a nice job communicating on defense,” said Johlie, who also had 2 assists. “We just came out with a lot of energy.”

By game’s end, Pirates coach Leslie Schock could see a little fatigue in her team that had played four games in the last five days. The Pirates used full-court pressure, some zone and a lot of man-to-man defense on Thursday.

“I thought we were a little tired at the end,” Schock said. “Our starting seven players played a lot of minutes. But obviously holding a team to 15 points is something to be proud of.

“It was a total team effort,” she added. “You look at our Deerfield game (on Tuesday) and it was the ‘Nia Pappas Show’ (she had 22 points and 6 3-pointers). Then you see the balance in this game. They put a box-and-one on Nia and it was nice to see other people step up and look to score.”

Johlie and teammate Laura Schweikert grabbed 5 rebounds apiece.

“Palatine did a good job running its offense,” said Lake Forest coach Kyle Wilhelm, whose father Perry is the athletic director at Mundelein High School. “They moved the basketball well and we had a hard time dictating the tempo.

“Keeping them to 40 points, though, wasn’t bad.”