Mepham rallies for key victory

Mepham struggled in the opening half of its Conference AA-III girls’ basketball road battle against Long Beach last Friday afternoon digging itself a 15-point hole, as the Lady Marines used a three-pronged scoring attack to score 41 points—a normal game total for most Lady Pirates’ opponents.

Coming out of intermission, however, Mepham (10-4 overall, 7-2 AA-III) found its legs, dug in its heels on defense and roared back for a 63-53 victory.

“We started limiting them to one shot and getting into transition,” Lady Pirates head coach Jim Mulvey said. “You can’t trade baskets when you’re down by 15.”

Leading the charge were Mepham’s core of seniors, Meghan Anderson, Alexas Morris and Nicole Moccio. Anderson drained five of the Lady Pirates 10 three-pointers (three coming in the second half) and scored a game-high 24 points with eight rebounds and five assists. “We definitely let it get away,” Long Beach head coach Kristin Ciccone said. “They caught fire in the second half, and fatigue became a factor for us.

“We got tired at the end, but some of the shots Anderson hit were from NBA-range so give her credit,” she added. “We weren’t going to guard her that far behind the three-point line.”

As Anderson heated up from behind the arc, Morris came alive in the paint, using dribble penetration to not only score her own baskets but also set up teammates. She finished with 15 points and three assists with her aggression carrying over to the defensive side as well. Morris pulled down a team-high 12 rebounds. “You can’t fastbreak if you’re giving up points,” Mulvey said. “You have to get one defensive stop at a time.”

Moccio scored all eight of her points in the second half, as Mepham outscored Long Beach 37-12 over the final two quarters, allowing just six points in each. Junior Taylor O’Brien chipped in with eight, while sophomore Maeve Testa added seven.

“We’re a team that moves the ball,” Mulvey said. “That’s the way we are. We don’t have top scorers like some of the teams we’ve played, but we share the ball. It’s a very balanced attack.”

After limiting the Lady Marines top offensive weapon, Kadaja Bailey, to just seven points in the first meeting between the teams (a 54-32 win for the Lady Pirates on Jan. 6) using a diamond-and-one approach, Mulvey stuck with the alignment in last Friday’s rematch with different results. This time, not only did Bailey score 15 points in the opening half, teammates Siobhan Rafferty (13 points) and Alexis Fanna (11) took advantage of some open space in the zone. “The [girls] that hadn’t made shots before [in the first game] really stepped up and made them,” Mulvey said. “We gave up 41 points in the first half and that’s our game average. So we went more to a straight man defense.”

And with that change, the duo if Refferty and Fanna, guarded by Testa and Morris, didn’t score a single point in the second half. In fact, all of Long Beach’s 12 second-half points were scored by Bailey.