Derrick Webb, Managing Editor
Southern Ohio Sports Authority is presented by OhioHealth.
LOGAN — Avery Wagner said it best.
“We’ll be back.”
Waterford’s standout center uttered those words during a press conference following a loss in last year’s state championship game.
That prophecy has now been fulfilled.
Wagner’s Wildcats are indeed “back.” They’re back in the Final 4, back in the state tournament and need one more victory to be back in the state title game.
They earned that right with a dominant 50-34 win over Berlin Hiland on Saturday at Logan High School in a Division VII regional final — winning the program’s second consecutive regional championship and its eighth since 2015.
CREDIT: Derrick Webb/SOSA
“Anytime you can beat Berlin Hiland, it’s special. That’s one of the premier programs in the state as far as I’m concerned,” Waterford coach Jerry Close said. “So it’s nice to be here and it’s nice to get a win over a program like theirs. We’ve just worked hard to mirror them and I don’t know that you can ever do that, but that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Nobody mirrored Kendall Sury on Saturday.
The Wildcats’ senior was phenomenal, scoring a game-high 26 points alongside five rebounds and two assists.
And that performance came in a different way. While Sury usually patrols the perimeter and makes a living driving to the bucket, Waterford found a mismatch that placed her in the paint.
She answered the bell, playing like she’d been playing in the post all year long.
“Kendall will never let you down,” Close said. “She does a good job of doing whatever we need. We knew that [Hiland] had the two bigs tonight that were going to contest our two bigs. So we knew that they couldn’t guard Kendall in the post. So we knew she’d have a mismatch and she was willing to go in there and what a heck of a job she did of getting herself open.”
Waterford’s Avery Wagner got the party started with a bucket just 12 seconds into the action. Hiland would battle to take a 6-4 lead with 5:41 left in the first quarter, but Brynlee Pottmeyer and Avery Smithberger would score to put the Wildcats back out in front, 8-6, with 1:44 to go.
The Hawks never led again.
After Sury made it a 10-6 game before the end of the first, she scored twice more to begin the second, producing a 14-6 count and capping a 10-0 run.
Hiland’s Joplin Yoder ended the run but Waterford tacked on a 3 via Elsie Malec before Sury scored yet again, stretching the lead into double digits at 19-8.
By halftime, Waterford had retained a 10-point lead at 24-14 and had held a, usually, prolific Hiland offense to just six field goals and zero 3-point field goals.
“On the defensive end, our bigs did a nice job of containing things,” Close said. “It’s a team effort. I thought everybody played their roles tonight. We got in foul trouble and Brynlee Pottmeyer had to step in and guard [Hiland’s Joplin] Yoder and she did a good job. Elsie has improved so much this year and we’re not really deep. We play one sub and the three young girls have done a great job with our seniors, and the seniors have done a great job of bringing them along, maturity-wise. We’ve had steady play out of them. It’s made this team special.”
Not much changed in the second half as the Wildcats continued to pad their lead.
Malec and Sury sank back-to-back buckets to begin the third before Pottmeyer pushed the edge to 30-16 with 3:22 to play. Sury later made it a 15-point game with a bucket and a foul, and Malec put Waterford in front 38-22 heading into the fourth.
From there, the Wildcats cruised to yet another regional crown.
“We’ve been preparing for this game all season long,” Close said. “We sat down and figured out what we needed to do to get back to this point and, hopefully, take that extra step. We made our schedule to where we were playing teams that would present problems for us. I think we did a pretty good job of that. [Hiland] is just so good defensively and they shoot the ball so well. But we put ourselves against teams like that and we learned a lot through it.”
CREDIT: Derrick Webb/SOSA
Following Sury’s magnificent outing was Pottmeyer with nine points, five rebounds and four assists. Malec added eight points, and six boards, and Wagner finished with three points and a game-high 11 rebounds.
Waterford now advances to a Division VII state semifinal at 7 p.m., Friday at Dover High School. The Wildcats will meet with Mogadore, who bested Danbury in a regional final by a 45-37 final.
“We have been very fortunate all year long in the fact that we’ve had sickness and we’ve had injury, but it seems like it’s happened when we’ve been able to recover,” Close said. “So we’ve been blessed. But Avery Smithberger got pretty beat up tonight. Kendall got beat up tonight. So we’re going to have a few days to rest up and that’ll help us out again. We’re going to play in a tough game in a tough environment.”
BOX SCORE
Hiland: 6-8-8-12 — 34
Waterford: 10-14-14-12 — 50
Hiland: 12-43 FG, 7-10 FT, 3-15 3pt., 22 rebounds (Yoder 6), 15 turnovers, 3 assists (Mullet 2). Scoring: Troyer 15, Yoder 13, Mullet 2, Habeger 2, Weaver 2.
Waterford: 21-44 FG, 5-12 FT, 3-11 3pt., 32 rebounds (Wagner 11), 15 turnovers, 14 assists (Pottmeyer 4). Scoring: Sury 26, Pottmeyer 9, Malec 8, Smithberger 4, Wagner 3.
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