Wheeling whips up winning finish at Warren
The recipe for success for the Wheeling girls basketball team might involve only one step on most nights.
"Just add water," Warren coach John Stanczykiewicz said with a laugh. "That's all you need with (Deanna) Kuzmanic. She's instant offense. She might be the best player we've faced all year.
"(Kuzmanic) affects the game in so many ways. She creates good space to get her shot off. She never takes a bad shot. And she looks for her teammates incredibly well."
Kuzmanic, who will play college basketball next year at Division I Alabama-Birmingham, was the perfect blend of scorer and facilitator for Wheeling on Saturday night in the championship game of the Warren Blue Devil Classic. The 5-foot-9 senior guard scored 28 points on 7 three-pointers and dished out 7 assists to lead Wheeling to a breezy 69-38 victory over Warren.
This is the second year in a row that the Wildcats (12-4) have won the tournament title at Warren. This time, they did so without starter Hannah Dobrowski, who was out with an illness after scoring 16 points on Friday night.
"I think we had a lot of big wins coming into this in pool play, against teams like Lake Forest and Grayslake Central, and that boosted our confidence a lot," said Kuzmanic, who hit 10-of-17 shots overall and was 7-of-12 from 3-point range. "The fact that we won it last year made us really want to win it again this year, too. And we had a lot of people step up to fill (Dobrowski's) role."
Kuzmanic and senior guard Hailey Dammeier were named to the all-tournament team. Kuzmanic says the 7 three-pointers she hit in the game is a career-high.
"My teammates were getting me great looks," Kuzmanic said. "I'm going to take those shots."
Dammeier had 12 points and 5 rebounds for Wheeling and sophomore forward Melissa Claver added 14 points and 7 rebounds.
"We have a lot of scorers on this team," Kuzmanic said. "We have the ability to really run the floor and shoot 3's and spread the points and that helps a lot."
A quick start also helped Wheeling. The Wildcats were up 17-10 after the first quarter and had extended that to a 34-20 lead by halftime.
"We were working together, we were making the extra pass on offense, we were able to move the ball in transition and we forced turnovers defensively. It was a great team win," first-year Wheeling coach Matt Weber said. "Obviously Deanna is a great player. She's a great team leader. She knows that when she's open, she's going to shoot. But she also knows that when her teammates are open, she's going to find them. Being that leader on the court really helps us.
"Her basketball IQ is off the charts. She buys into everything we're doing and she gets the team to buy into it also. She's such a true leader for us."
Kuzmanic led the Wildcats to even better results after halftime. Wheeling held Warren to just 9 points in each of the final two quarters, while running its lead to as many as 34 points.
"We played hard, we just were never able to get our feet under us," said Stanczykiewicz, whose team drops to 5-8. "We have to find a better way to play defense to handle a good shooter (Kuzmanic), and we didn't do that."
Warren, which starts freshman Jordyn Hughes and sophomore Rebekah Foley and was down three starters in Kylie Nedelka (calf), Brittny Ellis (personal) and Paige Prokof (personal), has had some growing pains this season. The Blue Devils started 1-7.
But a 4-1 mark in their holiday tournament has the players feeling much more optimistic.
"The young girls have been great to work with," said senior guard Sammi Jo Nixon, who scored 11 points on 3 three-pointers for Warren, just behind Hughes' team-high 12 points. "The three of us seniors (Nixon, Ellis, Prokof), we all talk about what we need to do to coach the young players and help them out so that we can all come together.
"We've come a long way and we just have to keep building our confidence up."
Foley and Hughes both made the all-tournament team for Warren.