With the clock winding down in the third quarter, Westfield takes possession of the ball. Down nine points, they have to score now if they want to stay in the game. Junior Will Kirby receives the ball in the corner, right near the home stands. He jab steps one way and dribbles the other way. Getting past his defender, he squeezes under the basket and nails a reverse layup. 35-42 Plainfield. The lead was within reach. However, as the period expired, so did the Blue Devils’ momentum. The Cardinals would outscore them in the fourth to win 42-54.
The third quarter was the only quarter in which Westfield was on the winning side of the scoring differential, outscoring Plainfield 15 to 12 in the period. They lost every other quarter.
Westfield only scored 5 points in the first quarter, while Plainfield came out firing with 13. Head coach James McKeon said, “We didn’t show up with any intensity. They did. They came out the gate ready to play. I think we were slow to it, and it was hard to match them to start. We settled in around the second but… we’ve got to be better and be ready to play early.” The Blue Devils scored a combined total of 12 points in the first and fourth quarters compared to 30 combined points from the second and third quarters.
McKeon noted that Plainfield was “a good basketball team. They just knocked off Elizabeth the other day.” The Cardinals took down Elizabeth 58-48 on Jan. 25. Elizabeth handed Westfield a loss in their first game of the season, so Plainfield was certainly a tough matchup for the Blue Devils.
Picking it up in the second quarter, Westfield began to score more. They were energized by highlight plays from junior Zach Epp and senior Shane Sheehan. With 3:30 left before halftime, Epp converted an and-1 on a made layup to shorten Plainfield’s lead. Then, with one minute left in the quarter, Sheehan performed a monster chasedown block on an unsuspecting Cardinal and immediately followed it on the other side of the court with an assist to junior Enzo Ferrero. Ferrero’s layup brought the score to 20-30 with Plainfield in the lead entering halftime. The junior was the team’s highest scorer with 11 points on the day.
When asked about the block, Sheehan said, “I saw him going up. I know I can get up pretty high, so I just tried to time it right and then jump when he jumped and blast that junk.”
Coming out of halftime, Westfield had a powerful showing on both sides of the ball. For the first 12 minutes of the second half, they held the Cardinals to only 12 points. McKeon said that it was just about their “effort. There’s no special sauce; we didn’t do anything different. There was a little bit of intensity behind [our play].” However, he said, “We didn’t sustain it, which is unfortunate.” The fourth quarter yielded different results.
Plainfield’s star freshman, Micah Gordon, had proven to be a problem for Westfield up until the second half, when junior captain Tyshawn Pearson made it his goal to lock up their leading scorer. “We were down by a lot so we had to come back. Going into the second half that was my job and all of our jobs to stop him from scoring,” said Pearson.
The score remained at 35-42 until 4:30 left in the game. Plainfield then began to score, going on an 8-0 run to bring the score to 35-50. Something similar happened in the fourth quarter of the teams’ first meeting. McKeon said, “That’s twice for them against us in the fourth…it’s a couple of possession game and they get hot and they go on a run all of a sudden.” The third quarter brought the Blue Devils back in it, and the fourth brought them right back out.
Throughout the game and especially in the last quarter of play, Plainfield excelled in transition play. McKeon said, “Their transition today was really ultimately what beat us; all of our baskets were hard-earned. I think they did very well in the transition game. And that goes back to them playing defense and us not executing on offense.”
Westfield faces off against Union away at 4 p.m. on Thursday. In their first meeting, the Blue Devils left victorious, winning 58-48. Westfield is now 8-10 on the season, and Union is 5-12.
