Bishop Guertin girls basketball beats Manchester Memorial to advance to fourth straight D1 title game (video)

MANCHESTER - Brad Kreick believes the Bishop Guertin High School girls basketball team has six starters.

Addison Smith showed why the Cardinals coach feels that way Thursday night in the Division I semifinals.

Smith came off the bench less than three minutes into the game and scored 21 points to help lead No. 1 Bishop Guertin to a 66-36 win over No. 4 Manchester Memorial at Southern New Hampshire University.

The Cardinals (20-0) will try to win their fourth straight D1 championship at 4 p.m. on Saturday at SNHU, when they take on No. 6 Portsmouth, which beat No. 2 Pinkerton 43-41 in overtime, in the other semifinal.

Bishop Guertin also got 14 points from Hannah Muchemore and 10 points from Ava Owens, while Aaliyah Foreman had a strong all-around game, with five points, seven assists and six rebounds, and helped hold Memorial's Lyric Grumblatt to just three points.

"The kids are pretty poised now," Kreick said. "You blink your eye and they go from being goofy freshmen to a bunch of juniors who have played 75 or 80 basketball games now. They’re not fazed by that much any more. It’s a luxury to have as a coach."

As a team, the Cardinals shot 50.9 percent from the floor and outrebounded Memorial 33-24, and while they forced 17 turnovers by the Crusaders (17-4), Bishop Guertin scored just 18 points off them.

Jennessa Brunette led Memorial with 10 points while Jessica Carrier had eight points and Ilyana Vega had four points and eight rebounds. Grumblatt hit one of two free throws to open the game, but didn't score again until making a layup with 2:38 left in the game.

"What we failed to do was set screens to get her open," Memorial coach Greg Cotreau said. "We weren’t setting screens. And it goes two ways. Lyric has to figure out a way to get herself open. Everybody knows she can shoot and drive to the basket. Now that we saw what transpired here, we know what we have to work on in the offseason. She’s going to get better. They found our weaknesses and did a really good job of exploiting them."

The game was tied 9-9 with 3:25 left in the first quarter and the Cardinals ended the frame on a 7-2 run to lead 16-11 going into the second. Memorial tried to play at Bishop Guertin's pace and kept the game within reach, as a basket by Foreman made it a 24-17 lead for the Cardinals with 5:43 left in the first half.

It was still a seven-point game when Smith took over the scoring for the Cardinals in the final four minutes, hitting a jump shot and then a putback to make it 28-17 with 3:20 left in the second. Memorial took a timeout and a basket by Tamarah Gould got the lead back down to single digits.

But with 19 seconds left in the half, Smith hit a basket in transition, and after a missed one-and-one by Vega, the Cardinals tried to set up a last-second 3-point attempt for Gabi Sousa. The Crusaders had it defended and Sousa found Smith open for a 3 to end the half and give Bishop Guertin a 33-19 lead.

"We’ve been rotating our starting lineup all year and we wanted to go quick early, see if we could get the tempo of the game going," Kreick said. "We don’t think of (Smith) as the first kid off the bench, we think of her as a starter. We have six of them, but we can only have five. She’s our second-leading scorer and our leading rebounder."

The basket was a tough one for the Crusaders to watch after playing well through the first 15 minutes.

"We were in it the whole first half," Cotreau said. "The backbreaker was when we over-rotate to Gabi Sousa, who we’re OK giving that shot to. We’re not OK giving that shot to Addison Smith on the wing. That dagger that they hit at the end of the first half, we were in the game until that point, and it took the air out of our sails.

"It’s psychological more than anything else. Against these guys, it feels like a mountain to climb. It’s hard to chip away because you’ve got to be able to score, and they do such a good job on defense. And then you’ve got to turn around and get stops. Our goal was to try to keep it within single digits as long as we could. For the first 15 minutes, we were able to do that."

The Cardinals stretched the lead to 20 points early in the third quarter and took a 49-26 lead into the fourth.

"Addison was hitting shots and that opened it up a little bit," Kreick said. "She hit that late 3 in the first half, and you look up, and we’re up 14 (points) and it didn’t feel like it. We got a little bit of a cushion and then we had a nice first three minutes of the third quarter. We’ve got to put this one past us and get ready for Saturday."