Crystal Lake South will play for tourney title
Crystal Lake South's girls basketball team will get another chance at winning the Northern Illinois Holiday Classic championship.
The Gators built as much as a 16-point lead midway through the fourth quarter then held off a late Dundee-Crown rally Monday to knock off the Chargers 49-42 in one semifinal of the tournament at McHenry.
CLS (11-3) will take on North Chicago at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday for the title. The Warhawks, who rolled over McHenry 46-17 in Monday's second semifinal, beat South 69-53 in last year's title game.
Dundee-Crown (6-8), which had a four-game winning streak snapped, will play McHenry at 11 a.m. Tuesday for third place.
"Going into this tournament the plan was to get back to where we were last year and get some redemption," said CL South coach Mark Mucha, whose team also beat D-C, 63-49, on Dec. 10.
CLS opened up a close game with a 17-10 run in the third quarter as junior Chanel Fanter scored 9 of her game-high 18 points in the period, helping the Gators take a 19-15 halftime lead and turn it into a 36-25 advantage going into the final period.
"I felt like we started making that extra pass to open girls and because (Dundee-Crown) had so much ball pressure we were able to get some open layups," said Fanter, who also hauled down 11 rebounds and had 3 steals.
In fact, the Gators made 13 of their 19 field goals (on 47 shot attempts) in the paint, burning D-C several times on backdoor passes.
"We did a pretty good job in the first half taking them out of their sets but in the second half we didn't do that and there's no excuse, really," said Chargers' coach Sarah Miller. "That's a credit to Crystal Lake South. They're a talented team and they finished the game."
But not before the Chargers made a little push. Trailing 43-27 after 2 free throws from Fanter with 4:51 left in the game, the Chargers went on an 8-0 run to cut their deficit to 43-35 on a basket from Creighton Fed with 1:39 to go. D-C, which committed 8 of its 17 turnovers in the fourth quarter, got to within 7, 47-40, on a Fed 3-pointer with 48 seconds left but couldn't get any closer.
"The bottom line is the little things we were doing in the first half we didn't do in the second half and we still had an opportunity to win the game," said Miller, whose team shot 18-for-48 for the game after going just 7 of 25 in the first half.
Kianna Clark added 10 points for CL South, which outrebounded the Chargers 35-25 and overcame 20 turnovers. Allison Michalski led D-C with 11 points and 6 rebounds, while Fed had 9 points and Lauren Lococo added 8 points, 4 assists, 4 steals and 2 blocks.
"Give credit to Dundee-Crown," said Mucha. "They made some adjustments from the last time we played and slowed us down. I'm not looking forward to playing them a third time."