Memorial girls showing grit through adversity

MANCHESTER, NH – A missed buzzer-beater opportunity aside, the Manchester Memorial High School girls basketball team has exhibited, at the very least, a never-say-die attitude.

More accurately, the Crusaders have shown an insatiable desire to win, no matter the situation.

After sprinting out of the gate of the 2022-’23 season with a 4-0 record, the Crusaders have been slowed the last two games by injuries and stiff competition.

But still the Crusaders battle.

And battle they did in their most recent contest, a 42-40 setback to visiting Salem on Tuesday night.

After being held to 2 points in the second quarter, Memorial surged back from a double-digit deficit in the fourth quarter to close the gap to 2 with seconds remaining in the game.

And though Memorial was unable to secure the game-tying shot, Salem head coach Ricky Oliver delivered a fairly blunt assessment of the Crusaders following his team’s victory.

“That’s a final four team right there,” he said. “They’re really good. You know, (Memorial head coach Greg Cotreau) has a couple kids that are out, and he had some other kids who stepped up and played a great game, but the thing that I love about them is they don’t quit. The game is not over with them until the last tick (of the clock) and the last horn, and if I can teach my kids that, we’re going to be good to go.”

Cotreau offered a similarly candid assessment of his team’s most recent efforts.

“We didn’t do a really good job for the first 28 minutes of the game doing any of the things we wanted to do,” he said. “We weren’t making shots, we weren’t rebounding. They’d shoot the ball and we’d send one person to the glass, not all five. The kids were not doing a good job those first 28 minutes, no matter who was out there.”

But down 16 points in the fourth quarter, Cotreau said something clicked among his players.

“It was like a lightbulb goes off, and they realize we’re going to get blown out on our own home floor if we don’t start doing what we should have done from the very beginning,” he said, “so we start doing those things and we really turned the game upside down on its head.”

Indeed, the shots started dropping, the players started rebounding and within a few minutes, the Crusaders were in striking distance of the visitors.

“We had a chance that last play,” said Cotreau “You know, great look, great pass, and you know we’ve run that play before, just not with that kid, so kudos to her for getting open and getting to the spot she needed to and going up with it. If she had caught that, it’s either and-1 layup or we’re going to overtime. But that one last play doesn’t define how the game went. We just didn’t come ready those first 28 minutes.”

Of course, going 3-for-23 from beyond the arc didn’t help.

“That’s been the MO of our season,” said Cotreau. “We’ve got some kids that can shoot, but those kids just aren’t shooting it well. You know, it’s a make or miss. They do the right thing, they make them in practice, but they’re just not falling (in games), and that’s something where our team has been settling early on for threes instead of working for the easier shots, and then you feel a little more confident because you see the ball go in rather than being frustrated because you’ve missed the first six or seven.”

With that said, the team wasn’t quite playing with a fell deck Tuesday.

Standout Maddison Pepra-Omani, the team’s leading scorer, aggravated a knee injury during last Fridays 55-43 loss at Goffstown and was limited to five minutes per quarter coming off the bench, and fellow starting guard Payton Moran was unavailable due to illness.

“Those are two starters we rely heavily on for lots of things that weren’t in the starting lineup,” said Cotreau, “so we had a group of kids that really hadn’t been on the floor together all that much, so we kind of expecting a slow start, but we’ll hopefully get those two back fully for Alvirne (Thursday night).”

Even in limited action, Pepra-Omani scored 19 points Tuesday, while NyAsia McKelve stepped up to drop 9 points and pull down 14 rebounds and Torle Adumene added 9 points and 7 rebounds to help the Crusaders push Salem right to the final buzzer.

The Crusaders look to get back on track tonight when they host 3-4 Alvirne at 7 p.m. From there, they’ll enter a tough three-game stretch that includes a home matchup with undefeated (4-0) Bishop Guertin tomorrow (Friday) night at 7, a short road trip to 6-0 Bedford for a 7 p.m. tipoff on Tuesday the 17th and then a cross-city clash at winless Manchester Central next Friday, Jan. 20 at 6:30 p.m.

“The first four games that we won, we turned the ball over an awful lot, like 25-plus per game, but we’ve done a pretty good job winning the rebounding battle, except for (Salem), and the turnover number has come down, but for us it’s all about our pace,” said Cotreau. “If we can get out and run, like the last four minutes (against Salem), that’s the team we need to be, so we need to go back and look at the tape and say, ‘what changed in those last four minutes?’ And then if we can apply that to the whole game, we’ll be in better shape going forward.”

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