City of Basketball Love

By Joseph Santoliquito (@JSantoliquito)
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WILLOW GROVE — A little touch of adversity can be a good thing this time of year. It can sharpen the senses, build patience and create an attitude when troubled times surface again, there’s experience to draw back on from beating previously dealing with it.

Upper Moreland’s girls’ basketball team faced such a situation Tuesday night in an early-season non-league game against visiting Harriton.

Nothing was working for the Bears. None of their shots were falling. Their offense wasn’t running the way they preferred. They appeared anxious and on the brink of losing their first game of this new season.

But they dealt with it.

With a halftime verbal nudge by Bears’ coach Matt Carroll, and very strong play by junior forward Holly Gohl in the second half, Upper Moreland remained unblemished at 2-0 in the first month of the season with a 31-27 victory.

Harriton, which is very young, dropped to 1-2, despite solid play from junior Felicity McFillin, who scored a game-high 13 points, including 12 of the Rams’ first 15 points.

It was the kind of game where actually no one walked away pleased. Carroll and his team had the solace of being 2-0 and little else, and Harriton coach Brian McCloskey came away knowing his young team is full of fight, though needs more experience to pull out games like Tuesday night.

“I’m really happy for the girls, but we struggled offensively early on,” said Carroll, whose team won their opener against Bensalem, 26-20. “We have some really good offensive players who are just struggling right now. Things did not look good in the first half. You don’t want to yell at your team, because you know that they’re not missing on purpose.

“We got some good looks inside the lane. We beat Bensalem this year and we dealt with the nerves and all of that were a big part of that, but Holly really, really played well tonight. In two years, she has over 600 points. She has great court awareness. She deflects passes and we not try to put her on threatening offensive player, because she reads passing lanes so well.

“I would say this was an ugly win. But I’d rather win ugly than lose ugly.”

Gohl started slow, as did the Upper Moreland team. The teams were tied 1-1 for the first five minutes of the game. Gohl had only two points at halftime, before erupting in the third quarter for nine of her team-high 12, making all four shots that she took.

“We just can’t find a rhythm,” Gohl said. “We shot 3-for-17 from three-point range against Bensalem in the opener and we didn’t shoot much better than that tonight. In the first half, our touch wasn’t on and we couldn’t finish.

“It is important that we overcame that and we’re 2-0. It’s really easy for teams to get down and crumble. We really fought back and we pushed ourselves to overcome that adversity. Coach Carroll was not happy at halftime. He let us know flat out at halftime that we were playing scared and timid. Harriton is very good, very skilled.

“The talk helped motivate me.”

Bears’ senior leader and starting point guard Emmy Faith Wood feels her team’s shooting woes will end soon.

“We just have to figure it out,” she said. “In the first quarter, it was ugly. We weren’t being strong with the ball, but I am proud with the way we rallied.”

Upper Moreland led once in the first half, 1-0, and Harriton took off from there. With offense coming in spurts, the Rams were able to build a 17-9 lead, which at the time, seemed insurmountable by the way both offenses struggled.

Gradually, the Bears began chipping away. Upper Moreland went on a 12-3 run, capped off by a Marie Meyers’ basket with 2:06 left in the third quarter for a 21-20 lead. It marked the Bears’ first lead since they were up 1-0.      

Harriton took a brief 22-21 lead, and Wood answered with a layup that gave Upper Moreland a 23-22 lead that it would not relinquish.

“They were bigger than us, and I think a lot of teams in the district and the state will be bigger than us, but I thought we did a good job defending and they got a couple of looks and we had a couple of mental lapses in transition,” McCloskey said. “I will take heart over height any day, and our girls have heart. We have to execute and that’s an experienced team over there, where I have sophomores and freshmen in my lineup that will get better. I can’t knock my girls for playing hard, that’s for sure.”

By Quarter

Harriton (1-2):  8   |  7  |  7  | 5  ||  27

Upper Moreland (2-0):  5   |  4  |  14  | 8  ||  31

Scoring

Harriton: Felicity McFillin 13, Alexis Kanziner 5, Maddie McFillin 4, Maddie Bacine 3, Sophie Kazmer 2.

Upper Moreland: Holly Gohl 12, Marie Meyers 8, Emmy Faith Wood 5, Lilly Hansen 4, Alyssa Wiley 1, Allison LaRocca 1.

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Joseph Santoliquito is an award-winning sportswriter based in the Philadelphia area who began writing for CoBL in 2021 and is the president of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be followed on Twitter here.