The high school sports story of the year took place this weekend in Columbia while nobody was paying attention.
The Cardinal Ritter College Prep girls basketball team flew under the radar all season in winning 20 games and advancing to the Final Four of the Missouri Class 3 state tournament, its first berth in the school’s history.
Not content to just show up at the Mizzou Arena and claim any trophy, the underdog Lions stunned the rest of the state by winning two hard-fought games and claiming its first state championship in dramatic fashion.
The Lions shocked Fair Grove, the state’s No. 1 team, 45-41 in the semifinals on Friday evening. Ritter came back on Saturday to defeat defending state champion Skyline 50-49 in a spine-tingling state championship game that was not decided until the final seconds.
Junior forward Hazaria Washington’s free throw with seven seconds left broke a 49-49 tie. The Lions had to survive two final attempts from Skyline in the closing seconds, including a point-blank layup at the buzzer that missed the mark, touching off a emotional celebration from the Ritter faithful.
Cardinal Ritter finished the season with a record of 22-4, winning its last 15 games in succession. The Lions were also the only girls team from the St. Louis area to bring home a state championship, despite not being on the area radar for much of the season. They were a true Cinderella story in every sense of the word.
“We shocked the world,” said Ritter assistant coach Terrence Miller, after his team’s triumphant press conference.
“Today was a blessing,” said head coach Darren Wade. “We feel deserving of this state title because our girls have worked hard for it. We put in a lot of work over the summer and we felt like we could be one of the best teams. Everyone stuck together like a family.”
Throughout its championship season, Cardinal Ritter relied on a stout defense and balanced scoring attack. If one player was off her game, there was always someone else to pick up the slack.
As the team’s leading scorer Washington struggled through an 0-for-eight shooting performance against Fair Grove in the semifinals, junior guard Breanna McCullough came through with 21 points and 11 rebounds. Senior point guard Alexys Plummer had seven points, seven rebounds and five steals. Both Plummer and McCullough are the younger sisters of former area prep stars who went on to be Division I collegiate standouts.
In the championship game, Washington came back with a strong performance as she scored a team-high 18 points on eight-of-14 shooting from the field while sophomore guard Tiara Baker chipped in with 11 points. Meanwhile, the Lions played stellar defense in both games, holding a Fair Grove team that came into the semfinals averaging 64 points a game to 23 points under their season’s average. In the finals, the Lions trailed 29-20 late in the first half, before their defense kicked in to spark an 18-4 run to take a 38-33 lead late in the third quarter.
“Our defense can go for four quarters,” Wade said. “It looked bleak there for a while when we were down by nine points, but we just kept playing defense and we got ourselves back in the game.”
And a bright, shiny new state championship trophy to boot.
