Bedford girls basketball starts fast to get past Concord Christian in D1 semis (video)

EXETER - Kevin Gibbs thought the Bedford High School girls basketball team might see something different Monday night from Concord Christian.

Sure enough, the Kingsmen opened the game face-guarding Bedford senior Kate Allard, and did Gibbs and his coaching staff ever prepare the Bulldogs for it.

Top-seeded Bedford went on a 14-0 run in the first quarter and led by double digits the rest of the way, as the defending champions rolled to a 58-34 win over No. 4 Concord Christian in the Division I semifinals at Exeter High School.

"It's a chess match at this point," Gibbs said. "What is the other coach going to do, and if I think that’s what she’s going to do, this is what we’re going to do. We prepped as much as you can. Everybody played exceptionally well."

Bedford returns to the title game for the fifth year in a row, where it will face No. 2 Londonderry, which defeated No. 3 Windham 51-36 in the other semifinal, for the championship at 4 p.m. Saturday at the University of New Hampshire.

While Allard had just five points against the Kingsmen, six other players scored for the Bulldogs (22-0), led by Mel McCarthy, who finished with 13 points. Sarah Muir had 10 points, including two 3-pointers, and Juliet Laws came off the bench to also score in double figures with 10.

"Since (Allard) was taken out of the play, we really had to play together," Muir said. "We just had to run the plays, and we were running specific plays so that it would be a four-person game and that’s exactly what we did."

Concord Christian coach Rebecca Carlile knew that even if her team was successful, it would still have to slow down the rest of Bedford's offense. Unfortunately for the Kingsmen (16-5), that didn't happen.

"She’s player of the year and that was our big game plan change, to contain her," Carlile said of Allard. "But they’ve got so many girls. They had (seven) players score to our three. They really did the best to execute the game plan we had for them."

Lilli Carlile led Concord Christian with 14 points and Emma Smith finished with 11 points, while also guarding Allard for most of the night. Kate Smith added nine markers for the Kingsmen.

"We thought they might faceguard Kate, which they did, but we have so many sets that force defenses to get in to help," Gibbs said. "We kept putting Kate in a position where Emma (Smith) had a choice to make. She either had to help or she had to stay wide, and we were converting. We were getting scores."

After Concord Christian took an early 4-3 lead, Bedford scored a lot, going on a 14-0 run, with the first 13 points coming in a span of just three minutes. The lead for the Bulldogs was 21-9 going into the second quarter, and while they scored just eight points in the quarter, Bedford held Concord Christian to just five for a 29-14 advantage at the break.

A 6-0 run to start the second half got the lead up to 21 points a little more than a minute into the third quarter. A 3-pointer by McCarthy made it 44-19 Bedford with 2:39 to play.

"Mel, the last five to seven games, she’s really come into her own," Gibbs said. "Everybody compares her to her sister, (Lana), but Mel is her own player. She can hit outside shots, she can put the ball on the floor, she’s a rebounder, she’s got all the post moves her sister taught her. She’s got a broader dimension to her game."

The championship game will not only be a rematch of the regular-season game won by Bedford, 60-53, on Feb. 21, but also a rematch of the D1 title game in 2014. Londonderry won that one 57-56 on a buzzer-beater.

"They’re a great team and we’ve done a lot of stuff with them, so we know them," Muir said of Londonderry. "It will be a really good matchup."