By Michael Wojtichiw
Whitney Young coach Krissy Harper came into Saturday’s city championship game with an unbeaten record in city title games.
Harper, who played at Young under the previous coach Corry Irvin (now coaching at the University of Illinois), won two title games as a player, but was looking for her first as a coach after taking over for Irvin in 2019.
She and her Dolphins accomplished something they hadn’t done since 2019 and collected their 13th city title with a 57-55 comeback win over Kenwood Saturday at Credit Union 1 Arena.
“It means so much to win with these girls,” Harper said. “If you guys only knew the battles we’ve been through this year, it means so much. They deserve it.”
“Every day at practice we look up at the banners and wish our names were up there,” Young freshman Destiny Jackson said. “Now our names are going to be up there. It feels really good.”
Even though the Dolphins have such a storied tradition, some of the players felt a little overlooked coming into the game with the Broncos.
“Kenwood’s a very good team, but I definitely think we were overlooked coming into the game,” Young junior Skylar Jones said. “I think everyone thought we were going to come here and lose. I think we just have to believe in ourselves.
“It feels like since coach Irvin has left, everyone doubted us from the jump. We’ve lost so many great players and a fairly young team, so it means a lot to bring the tradition back.”
At first, it looked like the doubters may have been right, as the Broncos got off to a fast start, not allowing the Dolphins (19-5) to get much of anything going offensively.
At one point down 17-6 in the second quarter, Young slowly but surely chipped away. A 17-6 deficit became 19-18 and 25-24 before the Broncos knocked down a 3-pointer as the second-quarter buzzer sounded to take a 28-24 lead into the half.
“We just had to slow down and be composed,” Jones said. “The atmosphere got our jitters up in the beginning, we just had to get ourselves together.”
“We stayed composed and didn’t crumble,” Harper said. “We came back to the bench and said ‘one basket at a time, one stop at a time.’ They believed in that and they relied on each other.”
The back-and-forth tussle continued into the third and fourth quarters, with neither team holding more than a three-or four-point lead until the Dolphins pulled ahead 54-47 with 3:11 remaining.
In fact, the third quarter alone contained six lead changes and four ties.
The loss was the Broncos’ first to a city team this year, but coach Andre Lewis knows he’s got a good squad this year and what they have to do to bounce back from the tough loss to Young.
“A lot of what happened was self-inflicted,” he said. “They’re a very good team, but I feel like we didn’t give ourselves an opportunity early enough to kill their run. All we had to do was continue to stay within ourselves and do what was working and we didn’t do a good job of that.
“It’s not the outcome we wanted, but it’s a matter of getting back to work, analyzing the film, seeing where we could have been better and executing. At this time of year, the team that can execute, the team that can do the little things well, those are the teams that advance and move on.”
Kenwood’s Brianna McDaniel, who scored a game-high 25 points, talked about what this year has been like so far for her and the Broncos (19-6) after last year’s COVID-impacted season and recovering from a torn ACL suffered last March.
““It has been a hard roller coaster just off the simple fact I didn’t know if I was going to play this year,” she said. “Just coming back and knowing that I can help my team in any kind of way was just amazing to me.”
Jones led the Dolphins with 17 points, while Jackson, who played every minute of the game, had 11 points, seven rebounds, three steals and five assists.
“We needed to get a win like this,” Harper said. “A lot of the losses that we have are to very, very good state-contending teams, normally under five (points), so to get a win like this, so close to the state playoffs, is a true momentum builder.”
