By Pat Coleman
D3sports.com
PITTSBURGH – In the end, Keri Carollo couldn’t even look.
In 20 years as head coach of the UW-Whitewater women’s basketball program, Carollo has won 391 games. Her Warhawks have won NCAA Tournament games in dramatic fashion, even in the national semifinals, on buzzer-beating shots.
None of those compares to the pressure of coaching a team that is doing so when your daughter is on the foul line, shooting two free throws with 3.0 seconds left.
So she couldn’t watch.
“Uh-uh. No, I did not,” she said, prompting a chuckle from the room.
“To be honest, my mind was completely blank,” said Kacie Carollo, a freshman starting guard for the team where her mom is the head coach and her dad, Joe, is an assistant. “At that point, it was just muscle memory that I was going to make them, because I practice them all the time.
“Aleah (Grundahl) actually said to me right before I got to the line, ‘I have all the confidence in the world in you.’ So I was like, ‘alright.’ ”
“You know, when your daughter is on the free throw line to send you to the national championship game, I don't know,” Keri Carollo said. “You hope, whether it's your daughter or not your daughter, you want your players to rise in those moments and revel in those moments, make it happen.
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| Keri Carollo, UW-Whitewater head women's basketball coach, closes her eyes as her daughter, Kacie Carollo, shoots two free throws with 3.0 seconds left in a national semifinal game against Amherst. Photo by Dan Hunter, d3photography.com |
“For her to be my daughter, it just makes it even more crazy, insanely special.”
The freshman indeed hit both foul shots, providing the capper to a game in which UW-Whitewater defeated Amherst 55-51 at the UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse on Duquesne University’s campus. The win sends the Warhawks (28-4) to the national championship game for the second time, where they will face the winner of Hope and Trine on Saturday, March 19.
The sequence capped a final three minutes which saw the Warhawks really struggle on offense. After UW-Whitewater got Amherst’s Dani Valdez to foul out of the game with 5:42 remaining, Grundahl hit two free throws to give UWW a 48-46 lead. And she followed on the next possession with a fast break layup off a feed from Veronica Kieres. But the Warhawks missed shots on their next three possessions. Lauren Pelosi hit a jumper on the right side of the paint with 2:24 to play to bring Amherst (25-4) within one. But Whitewater finally found the basket when Yssa Santo Domingo rattled in a 3-pointer from the corner with 2:03 left to push the advantage back to four at 53-49.
Keri Carollo took a timeout.
“I felt like defensively we were doing what we needed to do. We got back-to-back stops, there were three stops in a row,” the coach said. “But we just came up empty. We weren’t taking good shots. We were just rushing everything. I really just wanted to settle them down, settle them in, get some ball reversal action, just try to refocus, really.”
The Warhawks got three more defensive stops before Gabrielle Zaffiro stole the ball and drove for a layup to cut the lead to 53-51 with 46 seconds left, but Whitewater did not score until Carollo drew the foul with 3.0 seconds left and hit the final free throws.
Key in the game was getting Valdez, Amherst’s leading scorer, in foul trouble, which limited her to just under 24 minutes.
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| Aleah Grundahl works in the paint against Amherst senior Courtney Resch. Photo by Dan Hunter, d3photography.com |
“We just knew we had to get them off their feet, just really taking advantage of that inside-out game that we’ve talked about all season,” said Grundahl, who scored 18 points and had seven rebounds. “I knew down low that it was going to be physical, that they were going to be taller than me, so just getting them in the air, getting them leaning one way, me moving the other way, anything to really get them moving.”
Grundahl drew seven fouls and went 8-for-10 from the foul line. The Warhawks were 14-for-16 from the line, while just 18-for-60 from the floor (28.6%) and 5-for-18 from the foul line (27.8%).
Kacie Carollo finished with 11 points, seven of them in a spurt late in the third quarter, a quarter which ended with Amherst leading 44-41. But the Mammoths struggled in the final ten minutes, shooting just 3-for-17 from the floor and 0-for-7 from beyond the arc.
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| A steal and fast-break layup by Kacie Carollo late in the third quarter helped UW-Whitewater keep it close going into the fourth. Photo by Dan Hunter, d3photography.com |
Valdez led Amherst with 14, while freshman guard AnLing Vera played all 40 minutes and added 12 points. Valdez was 7-for-11 from the floor, and the rest of the Amherst team went 13-for-53, just 24.5%.
Maggie Trautsch scored 10 and went 2-for-3 from beyond the arc for UW-Whitewater.
UW-Whitewater won the last meeting between the schools as well, also in the national semifinals, when Mary Merg hit her second buzzer-beater of the night to give the Warhawks a 64-62 win in overtime to push UWW to the 2013 national title game.