Hiland rises to the moment at Classic in the Country

Hiland girls basketball coach Brady Schlabach was looking for a couple of fights during Classic in the Country XXIII.

They didn’t have to wait around because the fights quickly found the Lady Hawks.

Game 8 to end day one of CitC Jan. 17 featured a matchup with Bellevue, a team loaded with talent like Youngstown State-bound Kaitlyn Tuinksy, Ellie Frietag and Carrington Savage, and, oh yeah, the defending Division IV state champions.

Game 22 on Jan. 19 provided an exciting end to CitC, featuring a matchup with Norwayne, which offered talents like Hannah Froelich, Allie Demassimo and Ava Maibach, and, oh yeah, a team that finished last year as Div. V’s state runner-up.

Yes, the fight came to Hiland, and the Lady Hawks responded with some gritty, inspiring basketball, falling to Bellevue in a scrappy effort and taking down Norwayne in a thrill ride.

“Obviously, we would have loved to get that first one, but this was exactly what we wanted to experience at this event,” Schlabach said. “We’ve talked a lot about finishing out big games and making game-winning plays down the stretch. For our kids, we’ve been in some big games against great competition, and we’ve played well but haven’t won them. To know that we can compete and win those types of games after the Norwayne win is exciting. It’s going to energize us as we fine-tune things.”

Game 8 saw Hiland claw and scrap for everything it could get. With five minutes to play, the score stood knotted at 35-all before Hiland simply ran out of gas and fell 46-39.

That Hiland played Bellevue, the state’s No. 2-ranked team by MaxPreps, that tight despite going just 1-for-17 from beyond the arc was something to bolster confidence.

“The fight in our kids, the willingness to not back down was really encouraging,” Schlabach said. “We’re starting to figure out how to compete in these types of games, which is important because this is what we will face in important tournament play. We didn’t back down, and we were that close despite shooting the ball poorly. This was a fun game to be a part of.”

Having lost an extremely important piece of the puzzle when star shooting guard Evie Mast went down with a season-ending knee injury, Schlabach said the process has begun to see players stepping into new roles to fill her shoes.

Then came the grind with Norwayne, MaxPrep’s second-ranked team in Div. V’s Northeast Region.

The issue in game two wasn’t the shooting woes Hiland experienced, as the Lady Hawks canned an impressive 11-of-20 from downtown. On this night, it was rebounding, with the taller and more athletic Bobcats outrebounding the Lady Hawks 42-22, including an eye-popping 26 boards collected off the offensive glass.

Yet, despite that massive disadvantage, Hiland managed to pull out a thrilling 63-53 win.

Perhaps the most impressive part of this contest was that Hiland had built a 16-point lead midway through the third period, thanks in large part to sophomore sensation Perryn Mishler, who scored 20 of her game-high 31 points in the first half. She got plenty of help from junior post Reagan Zerger, who added 18 points and a team-high five assists.

But what was truly important was that when the Bobcats came charging back and trimmed the deficit to three points just before the end of the third period, Hiland responded by picking up its defense and making some clutch shots.

The game even came with two beautifully crafted inbound plays with two seconds left. The first came prior to the end of the half, when Schlabach inserted foul-plagued point guard Macy Mullet back into the contest.

Mullet circled around the top of the key, and the ball was inbounded to Zerger, who flipped it out to Mullet, who drained a 25-footer as time expired.

The second came courtesy of Zerger. After a scrap for a loose ball on the left sideline and a tie-up gave possession to Hiland, a lob pass across the court found Zerger, who uncorked a rainbow trey that nestled into the net to give the Lady Hawks a lead of 12.

It capped off a stunning run that came on the heels of Norwayne’s impressive showing moments earlier that saw it trim its deficit to three.

“We practice that set about every time we go through offensive stuff, but we haven’t used it a lot,” Schlabach said of the play. “They were both similar, and to see them execute it was pretty cool.”

Schlabach said seeing his team’s toughness, physicality and determination during these two CitC contests was something that the program can build on moving forward.