West Bloomfield Hangs On to Edge Rockford, Reach 1st Final since 1989
By
Keith Dunlap
Special for MHSAA.com
March 18, 2022
EAST LANSING – West Bloomfield girls basketball coach Darrin McAllister said his team has played all sorts of opponents and their varying styles this season, but he admitted he hadn’t seen a team like Rockford.
And that included Detroit Edison, a squad that hadn’t lost to a Michigan school since 2017-18 before West Bloomfield won their February matchup.
“We have not faced a team that shoots that amount of threes and has the ability to make them,” McAllister said of Rockford.
Indeed, in Friday’s first Division 1 Semifinal at Michigan State’s Breslin Center, West Bloomfield saw Rockford attempt a whopping 37 shots from 3-point range against the Lakers’ zone, making 13 of them.
In contrast, West Bloomfield made only three shots from behind the 3-point line.
“I do play a lot of different zones, but I was definitely searching for something,” McAllister said.
Despite the barrage of 3-pointers and 30-point disadvantage from behind the 3-point line, McAllister saw his young team overcome and find a way, as West Bloomfield made the winning plays at the end to earn a 66-63 win over Rockford.
The Lakers (24-1) advanced to the championship game for the first time since 1989, when it finished runner-up to Grand Rapids Ottawa Hills.
“I’m happy that we won, but if I had hair I’d probably have pulled it out by now,” McAllister joked.
The big reason why West Bloomfield was able to survive was its sophomore forward duo, Indya Davis and Summer Davis.
Indya Davis had 24 points and eight rebounds, while Summer Davis had 16 points and seven rebounds.
Senior Myonna Hooper added 14 points, and junior Sydney Hendrix had 10 points and 10 rebounds as well for the Lakers.
“I didn’t take it upon myself,” Indya Davis said of her performance. “I took it upon the whole team and doing it for the team.”
With the game tied at 58-58 with 1:02 remaining, West Bloomfield took a 60-58 lead after two free throws by Hooper.
Following a turnover by Rockford, West Bloomfield extended the lead to 61-58 when sophomore Destiny Washington hit the first of two free throws with 40 seconds to go.
Washington missed the second free throw, but Summer Davis got the offensive rebound and passed the ball back to Hooper, who was fouled and drained both free throws to give West Bloomfield a 63-58 advantage with 36.6 seconds remaining.
On Rockford’s next possession, a 3-point attempt by Gabrielle Irwin rimmed out and was rebounded by Indya Davis, who got the ball up to Washington.
After being fouled, Washington split a pair of free throws with 14.1 seconds remaining to give West Bloomfield a 64-58 lead and all but seal the game.
The teams then traded two free throws each before Rockford hit a 3-pointer right at the buzzer to account for the final score.
Rockford saw six different players connect on 3-pointers, led by sophomore Grace Lyons, who drilled five en route to a team-high 21 points.
Rockford coach Brad Wilson admitted his team usually doesn’t shoot that many 3-pointers in a game.
“That’s more than normal, but we are fully capable of doing that,” Wilson said. “Sometimes, you take what the defense gives you. We believe in our kids. It’s a little bit unusual, but all five players on the court have the green light at all times. We just believe in them. We attack gaps and pass where the help comes from. We rep that out all year, so we have confidence that it’s going to go in.”
Rockford was making its first appearance as a program in a Semifinal, and the community certainly followed with a good portion of Breslin Center covered in orange.
“I am so proud of our community and the support they gave,” Wilson said. “Just to be a part of something like that, a sea of orange, was just so much fun.”
Rockford held a 31-26 lead at halftime and was up 36-30 in the third quarter before West Bloomfield went on a 9-0 run to take a 39-36 lead with 5:52 left in the period.
Rockford then got hot from the perimeter again, hitting three more 3-pointers before the quarter ended to take a 49-48 lead into the fourth.
PHOTOS (Top) West Bloomfield celebrates its Division 1 Semifinal win over Rockford on Friday. (Middle) The Lakers’ Sydney Hendrix (5) gets a shot up over a pair of Rams defenders. (Click for more from Hockey Weekly Action Photos.)
Edison Advances to 1st Hoops Final
March 16, 2017
By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor
EAST LANSING – When Monique Brown heard voices as she walked past her players’ hotel rooms late Wednesday night, she was a little concerned.
Maybe she’d made a mistake bringing her young team to East Lansing the night before the biggest game in school history.
But as they have other times before, Detroit Edison Public School Academy’s players proved their coach wrong, coming out Thursday afternoon anything but sluggish in earning an even more memorable opportunity.
DEPSA – with nine freshman, a sophomore and two juniors on its roster – looked neither tired nor inexperienced in handing annual Breslin visitor Flint Hamady a 54-31 defeat in the day’s first Class C Semifinal.
“We got there late, and we couldn’t sleep. We were just talking about what we can do,” Pioneers sophomore guard Rickea Jackson said. “They came knocking on our doors … they took our phones. We couldn’t do anything but talk.”
DEPSA (20-5) will face Pewamo-Westphalia in Saturday’s Class C Final at 4 p.m. It will be the Pioneers' first appearance in an MHSAA girls basketball championship game.
As much as they had to discuss after midnight the evening before, Jackson and her teammates made a loud statement with their play to tip off this Finals weekend.
They held Hamady to 8.3-percent shooting from the floor during the first half in building a 28-8 lead. The Hawks did recover to shoot an improved 36 percent during the second half, but DEPSA made 49 percent of its shots for the game – and freshman Gabrielle Elliott had nine field goals, only one fewer than Hamady as a team.
Elliott finished with 24 points and Jackson had 16 and eight rebounds as they combined to drop 16 of 26 shots from the floor – not bad for a couple of underclassmen on the biggest stage for the first time.
“We’ve never done that to a team like Flint Hamady, and I really commend my young group,” Brown said. “They’ve been preparing for this, we’ve talked about it, and as we’ve went through the season … I told them it was all in preparation for today. I always told them I don’t want to hear people say we’re talented; I want to hear them say how hard we play.”
Brown, also the school’s athletic director, had to know what she had coming this winter and scheduled appropriately. DEPSA opened 9-0, with a one-point win over Southfield Arts & Technology, a Class A semifinalist this weekend.
But the No. 5-ranked Pioneers then ran into a tough spot, losing three of its next five to Class A power Detroit Martin Luther King and Class B contenders Detroit Country Day and Ypsilanti Arbor Prep. Sandwiched among those defeats, however, was a 43-39 win over Hamady, which made its third Semifinal appearance of this decade Thursday and finished Class C runner-up in 2015.
That first Hawks loss to DEPSA on Jan. 31 was Hamady’s third straight after losing senior guard Krystal Rice for the season to a knee injury. Without Rice – who will continue her career at Indiana State University – the Hawks still managed to navigate a tournament run that included handing top-ranked Sandusky a 38-36 loss in the Regional Final.
“We didn’t give up on the season,” Hamady coach Keith Smith said. “We spent a lot of time watching film, spent a lot of time drilling on fundamentals, trying to tweak the little things we were not doing well and trying to be concerned on the details. (But) it caught up with us today to not have her, that extra senior who had played in a state final.”
Senior guard Deajah Cofield and freshman center Aryana Naylor both scored 10 points to lead Hamady, Cofield also totaling five steals and Naylor grabbing 10 rebounds.
With Rice out, Cofield was the only senior starter for Hamady, which finished the regular season unranked but ended up with a final record of 19-6.
Smith said he hadn't seen a team as talented as DEPSA with that many young players since his 2009 Class C championship team.
The Pioneers didn’t play like mostly underclassmen Thursday, just a team with a little bit of a chip on their collective shoulders and the talent to dominate the next two to three seasons as well.
“(People) said we’d lose to Sandusky, and they didn’t make it to us, and they said we’d lose to Blissfield by two,” Jackson said, noting the 16-point Quarterfinal win over the No. 10 Royals. “We’re just tired of people doubting us. We’re so young, we don’t have any seniors, and we just want to prove everyone wrong.”
The Girls Basketball Finals are presented by Sparrow Health System.
PHOTOS: (Top) DEPSA's Gabrielle Elliott pushes the ball upcourt during her team's Class C Semifinal win. (Middle) Rickea Jackson works to get a hand on a shot by Flint Hamady's Danielle Tipton.