By Adam Michael
It's official. This season, Greencastle-Antrim owns Gettysburg in girls' basketball.
The Warriors suffered their second straight 20-plus point defeat and their third loss on the season to the Blue Devils on Wednesday night. A 61-35 thrashing knocked the Warriors out of the District 3 Class AAA playoffs.
"No disrespect to Gettysburg, but the girls knew they had the better team," Greencastle-Antrim head coach Mike Rhine said. "When you shoot with confidence and finish with transition, that's the way it can go."
The Blue Devils had four 10-point scorers in the game before Cami Boehner — the one and only Warrior to score in double digits — crossed the threshold with 6:50 left in the game. The third all-time scoring leader at Gettysburg finished the game with 11 points, and her career with 1,382.
"We played them twice before and tried to prepare ourselves as much as possible," Boehner said. "We just couldn't get it going."
In the first half, the Warriors tried to take away Hannah Crist, who scored 23 points in the previous matchup. That game plan worked if that was the only objective; Crist went into the half with only four points.
But the rest of the Blue Devils put on a 3-point shooting display, draining six of nine from behind the arc to take a 38-20 lead into the break. Jenay Faulkner led her team with 11 points in the first half, and 16 overall. Crist and Katie Geisinger chipped in a dozen apiece, and Chloe Hoover, the Devils' only senior, scored 10 in the game.
"It's not like the other players on that team are complaining that we took away their point guard," Gettysburg coach Casey Thurston said. "They stepped up and knocked down shots. They're so good, all of them, that you can't have a weak link on the floor on defense."
Rhine gave the Warriors credit for coming out of the gate quickly after two weeks without games. Gettysburg led 9-3 before Greencastle caught fire from the line.
A 3-pointer and a layup from Hoover erased the last of Gettysburg's lead at the 3:51 mark in the first quarter. Faulkner drained two more from long range and it was all Devils from there.
"We haven't gotten within 20 of these guys," Thurston said. "Coming out strong for us was a confidence boost, maybe. But you start knocking down 3-balls and whatever confidence boost you had goes away real fast."
Rhine was proud that his team was able to hold Boehner to 11 points for the second consecutive matchup. He said the recipe was a whole lot of Jane Herman with a dash of Morgan Wagaman.
"I wish Cami was on my team. She's an awesome player," Rhine said. "When you play against that player you make it as difficult as possible. I told Jane, "if (Boehner) walks over to get a drink, knock the cup out of her hand. We need to be as annoying as possible the entire game.'"
Thurston said the graduation class of Boehner, Maddie Weikert and Larissa Felton is the first to make the District 3 Class AAA playoffs all four years since she took the job in the 2007-08 season.
"I don't know how many kids out of Gettysburg have done that," she said. "They played two years in states and at the Giant Center. If nothing else, we lose that playoff experience and grit."
Said sophomore Sierra Brown: "The hustle. The hustle will be hard to replace."
