It was a basketball game. It was also a party.
By the end, the whole gym was smiling. The whole gym, that is, except for the pocket of Scotch Plains-Fanwood fans bemoaning their 63–44 loss.
If someone had composed a program for this Westfield Senior Night, the agenda would have read as follows:
Honor the seniors before the game. Demolish SPF. Honor the seniors again after the game.
And, yep, that’s precisely what happened.
Westfield’s success hinged on the way it neutralized Amanda Baylock, SPF’s star guard. Baylock, who has shattered opposing defenses this season and scored at an absurd rate, is the team. Without her, the Raiders are worse than rudderless.
Stopping Baylock—the star, the engine—required a tenacious defender. Enter Sutton Factor.
“Amanda’s a great player,” head coach Liz McKeon said. “But Sutton’s a great defender, and Sutton’s a great athlete. And I think Sutton, along with her teammates, did a great job.”
Baylock clenched her fists in frustration, shook her head in exasperation, smacked her hands together in anger. Stymied, once again, by Westfield’s defense.
“I shut her down last year,” Factor said, “so mentality is the same thing. I’m confident in my defense, and I think it’s a big mental game.”
Baylock did finish with 16 points, but the majority of those arrived in the fourth quarter, with the game decided and Westfield’s strongest lineup lounging on the bench. The Blue Devils led 41–28 after the third quarter. The fourth quarter was mostly a formality.
Westfield found offensive production from a host of players. Catie Carayannopoulos led with 14 points and 7 rebounds. Sara Rooney scored 13 points and made 5 steals, and Annie Ryan and Paige Gorczyca added 12 points apiece. Gorczyca also had 8 rebounds and 5 assists.
“We look for the holes in their defense,” McKeon said. “And you can plan all you want, but these girls actually executed it, and that’s the difference.”
The inexorable Blue Devils did it slowly, gradually, comfortably, only pulling away in the third quarter. The margin stood only 25-20 at halftime, but the 5 points felt like 15. A Westfield victory seemed inevitable.
And when the buzzer sounded triumphantly, the second round of Senior Night festivities broke out. There were balloons. There were gifts. There were posters and pictures and some more posters. There were even cookies.
Family and friends crowded the floor, and the atmosphere turned celebratory. But Senior Night and all its accompaniments didn’t impede Westfield’s greater goal: win.
“I was really excited, but then again it’s just a night,” Factor said. “The game plan was to get a dub, and we couldn’t let Senior Night distract us from that.”
Factor. Gorczyca. Ryan. Cara Van Allen. Ava Burke.
These are Westfield’s five seniors. These are seniors whose loaded resumes contain a county championship, the program’s first sectional championship and the program’s first Group 4 state championship. These are seniors who changed Westfield girls basketball forever.
So when McKeon said that “this just really is a special group of girls,” it rang true.
Coaches on television have, through years of repetition, turned the phrase “this is a special team” into a platitude. But, sometimes, a coach calls her team special, and you really believe it.
That was Liz McKeon on Saturday night.
By Michael Liebermann
Live tweeting by Emily Weinstein
