Coe-Brown girls basketball holds off Pembroke to reach D2 championship game
MANCHESTER - It's playoff time, and no one wants to go home.
That's what the No. 1 Coe-Brown Academy girls basketball team has learned in its first three postseason games this year, most recently Thursday night in a 39-32 win over No. 5 Pembroke Academy in the Division II semifinals at Southern New Hampshire University.
Despite beating the Spartans by 31 points during the regular season, the Bears had to scratch and claw their way back to the Division II championship. Coe-Brown looked ready to pull away in the second half, but Pembroke rallied to make a it a one-point game going into the fourth quarter.
"You're trying to finish someone's season and nobody wants to go home," Coe-Brown coach Joe Vachon said. "It's always going to be a battle and who wants it more.
"When you hold a team, in a semifinal game, to 30 points, as coach, you're happy. Offensively, I felt we were stagnant, forced a lot of things and we weren't patient. I think we were rushing stuff and some stuff wasn't falling. That's the way it goes. It was another one we had to grind out and the girls."
That's what the Bears (21-0) have done throughout the postseason. In the opening round, they led by just four at halftime over No. 16 Hollis Brookline before winning by 18 points. Coe-Brown took No. 9 Portsmouth's best shot in the quarterfinals, and got the same from Pembroke in the semifinals.
Jennifer Schlim led Coe-Brown with 10 points and nine rebounds and Deborah Peabody added eight points and eight boards. Sarah Curtin and Sydney Fisher had seven points apiece for the Bears, who shot just 24 percent from the field.
Pembroke (15-6) got 11 points and nine rebounds from Karli Loiselle while Hannah Seidner had nine points, all on 3-pointers, and six boards.
Both teams finished with 12 field goals, and four 3-pointers, but Coe-Brown was 11 of 14 from the line, outscoring Pembroke (4 of 6) by seven.
The offenses were non-existent in the first half, as the teams were tied at 3 until the Bears went on a 5-0 run to end the first quarter up 8-3. Coe-Brown went up 15-5 on a layup by Curtin with 2:06 left in the opening half, but Pembroke scored the last four points of the half to cut the lead to six at the break.
"Thing I wasn't happy with, at halftime, our offensive rebounding was very poor compared to where it normally is in the past," Vachon said. "We're a team that normally gets second and third opportunities. Offensive rebounding, we were not hustling for the ball."
Coe-Brown did a better job to open the second half and went ahead 22-11 midway through the third quarter. But Pembroke wasn't done, as a 3 by Kaylee Montminy and layups by Karli Loiselle and Madison Allen cut the lead to four points.
After a Coe-Brown turnover, Seidner hit a 3 to make it a 22-21 game going into the fourth.
"She hit a couple of 3s," Vachon said of Seidner. "Loiselle would come down and take on to the basket. Or (Allen) would take it to the basket."
Vachon called a timeout after the 3 by Seidner to set something up for the final 1:15 of the quarter, but while it didn't work then, it did in the fourth for Coe-Brown.
"We wanted to work on the low post where (Loiselle) had four fouls," Vachon said. "We wanted Jenny (Schlim) and Abby (Ahern) to get a chance. Our patience wasn't that good, so I felt like we needed to run something simple."
The pair combined for 10 of Coe-Brown's 17 points in the fourth quarter, including 6 of 6 from the line to put the game away.
The Bears will get another team that they have already beaten in the regular season in Goffstown in Saturday's championship game.
"They're a formidable team," Vachon said. "We battled with them at Coe-Brown. We didn't pull away until the end of that game. They dropped nine 3-pointers on us. They are capable of doing some damage."
