Robert Perea
Greenwave girls’ basketball coach Kevin Wickware may not have been so bold as to foresee a regional championship in his team's future. Still, around midseason, he saw things beginning to coalesce.
Six weeks of stellar basketball later, the Greenwave are regional champions.
Fallon rallied from an 11-point halftime deficit to beat Lowry 61-55 in the regional semifinals on Friday, then steamrolled Fernley 63-31 in the championship game Saturday to clinch the regional title and the North's No. 1 seed for this week's 3A State Tournament.
The Greenwave girls are scheduled to face South No. 2 seed Mater East at 3 p.m. Thursday at Clark High School. With a win, they would play for the state championship at 3 p.m. Friday at the Cox Pavilion on the campus of UNLV.
The Greenwave have won 12 consecutive games since a loss to Lowry on Jan. 10 put their record at 11-6. That winning streak includes two wins over Lowry, the two-time defending state champions, and three over Fernley, which was undefeated in league play each of the past two seasons and lost only to Fallon in league play this season.
"I just saw that the pieces were coming together throughout the middle of our league season and I think it just clicked at the right time," Wickware said. "We played really well as a team through the last few weeks and I think we're just kind of riding that right now."
While the Greenwave players were riding the momentum, Lowry and Fernley each got buried by it. Lowry led 35-24 at halftime of Friday's semifinal, only to see the Greenwave outscore them 18-8 in the third quarter and 19-12 in the fourth.
"We play that kind of basketball where we're up and down the whole game, and we understand that we're going to have streaks and runs, and we just hope that they always end up in the fourth quarter when we're still in striking distance," Wickware said.
Fallon carried that momentum into Saturday's championship game against Fernley, picking up right where it left off a week earlier. In the final game of the regular season, Fallon outscored Fernley 19-3 in the fourth quarter to turn a close game into a blowout. This time, it was a blowout nearly from the beginning.
Fallon led 15-7 after a quarter and 33-14 at the half, and the only suspense in the second half was how wide the final margin would be.
The Greenwave pressured Fernley into turnovers on the perimeter and didn't allow Fernley's Taylor Tollestrup to touch the ball much in the paint, where nobody in the league has been able to stop her. Tollestrup came into the game averaging 19 points per game but scored just 8, making only two shots from the floor.
"We've been really focusing defensively for the last couple weeks and I think I's been starting to pay off for us," Wickware said. "We stayed with our game plan throughout the whole day and it paid off for us today."
As a reward, the members of the Greenwave squad gathered en masse to accept the regional championship trophy; then, after the boy's regional championship game was over, they got to cut down the net, each player taking a turn to snip off a strand of the nylon.
"It's just a culmination of what our program, our staff and our girls have been doing over the last couple of weeks," Wickware said.
Now the Greenwave turn their attention to facing Mater East, and with a win, a shot at the championship against either Virgin Valley or in a rematch with Fernley.
"We'll definitely study some film before we head down so we'll be ready to go play on Thursday," Wickware said.
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