The Walpole girls basketball team had a tragic loss on Valentine’s night, February 14, to Dedham. Despite leading by as much as 14 points in the first half, the Marauders kept battling, and ended up winning the game with a final score of 45-43.
In the first half of game play, the Rebels were clearly the better team, as they were able to get the ball inside to senior Captain Shannon Cullen and freshman Summer King. The two had a total of 17 points of Walpole’s 27 at half time. But due Dedham’s scrappy defense and attack-minded offense, King got into foul trouble, and was forced to sit on the bench.
Then Dedham started to score points. Everything from breakaway layups to semmingly improbable threes were going in. With a hot offense and an increasingly stingy defense, Dedham began to inch its way back into the game.
With less than 5 minutes left in the game, both junior Bridget Nicholson and King got their 5th foul, therefore were fouled out and were unable to complete the remainder of the game.
With 0.7 seconds left on the clock, junior Lauren Bodin was at the freethrow line with two shots left, and the Rebels were down by three points. Bodin confidently made the first attempt—but had to intentially miss the second shot inorder to have an oppertunity to tie the game. Due to a voilation of the basketball not hitting the rim of the basket on Bodin’s freethrow, it was Dedham’s ball.
At the last meeting between the two teams, the Rebels beat the Marauders 50-31.”It was disappointing. Last time, we were able to beat Dedham pretty handily, and this time we just couldn’t keep up with them. We have no one to blame but ourselves, and we’ll go back to the practice tomorrow trying to correct our mistakes,” said sophomore Elizabeth Ryan on the loss.
The loss does not impact the Bay State standings; however, it may lead to a lower seed in the tournament.
